


Water Means a First For Us

by disappointed_turtle



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-08
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-06-23 19:27:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 29,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15613323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disappointed_turtle/pseuds/disappointed_turtle
Summary: Jaime travels north after leaving Cersei





	1. Chapter One

“And you’re _sure_ it wasn’t a starved man?” Bronn says. “I’ve seen men starved so they looked like skeletons, covered in boils, bed sores, lice. Yellow eyes. Hair and teeth falling out. They don’t look human, it would be an easy mistake to-”

                “It was a dead man!” snaps Jaime, losing patience. “It wasn’t one of our men disfigured by dragonfire, captured on the Goldroad and made to act the part. It wasn’t one of the stone men brought from Old Valyria. It wasn’t someone who’d been imprisoned and starved for years. The Hound hacked it to pieces right in front of us. Its severed hand carried on moving. Its severed torso kept on moving. I don’t know how I can make it any clearer.”

                “All right, all right.”

                They sit in silence for some minutes before Bronn, apparently back to business as usual, says, “Well, the first thing I’ll do when we get off this stinking ship is find the nearest brothel and stick my cock in a woman. And you’ll be paying seeing as the gold you gave me’s either melted to sweet fuck on the Goldroad or buried in the mud.”

                “You lost it,” Jaime points out. “It’s not my fault you’re clumsy.”

                Bronn turns ominously. “Aye, and it’s not my fault you sent me off to shoot a dragon down. You’ll be paying. Oh, and get yourself a woman while you’re there. I’m fed up with looking at that fucking grim face of yours. It’s enough to make a man jump overboard.”

                “I’m not going to a brothel.”

                “Oh aye, because Lord ‘I’ve-only-ever-been-with-Cersei’ has to brood for the rest of his short life. In a few weeks, you might well be dead. Your family’s not very popular with the Starks and Targaryens and you’ve no army to offer them. Do what normal men do and fuck a few women first.”

                Jaime envisages it, expecting to feel repulsed. Instead he experiences a kind of wonder that this is now a possibility. Acting like a normal man. There is a weightlessness to him. He feels tempted to hold onto the table they are sitting at in case he floats away.

                Bronn eyes him knowingly. “You’re not pissed off because you left her. You’re pissed that you didn’t do it sooner. You’re pissed that your little brother called it right. Can you imagine if your sweet sister had three dragons? She wouldn’t just have ridden the one into battle and fired mostly on the wagons. She’d have brought all three and she’d have torched everyone. The whole fucking world’d be burnt to a crisp and she’d be sitting on top of the ashes with a flagon of wine, trying to imprison the smoke for committing treason. She’s a paranoid lunatic.”

                “You really do like the sound of your own voice, don’t you?” says Jaime. “I still don’t know why you’re coming north. You’ve never been one for a lost cause.”

                “It’s not a lost cause. There might be a hundred thousand walking dead men, but there’s also a big fucking wall that’s held firm for thousands of years. I go north to offer my services and your brother puts in a good word for me with the dragon queen. I finally get the rewards you Lannister cunts have been promising me for years.”

                “I don’t think she or her dragon is going to be offering you flowers and a kiss after you put a bolt in its shoulder.”

                “I’ll settle for a castle.”

                Jaime rubs his beard. “I won’t have a woman in a brothel,” he says.

                Bronn frowns at the abrupt change in conversation. “No?”

                “No. A woman’s body isn’t something to be purchased. She should offer it with enthusiasm. If I learnt anything from my sister and her marriage to Robert, I learnt that. I’ll go to a tavern and...” He gestures vaguely.

                Bronn is impassive. “I didn’t see many blondes in the North last time I was there.”

                Jaime pretends not to hear.

\---------------------------------------

 

He removes his golden hand before they arrive at White Harbor and keeps his stump hidden in his sleeve. It is late when they dock, and they trudge through knee-deep snow to the nearest inn and pay for two rooms. While Bronn knocks back ale and scans the women, Jaime listens in on the conversations going on around them.

                “You’re forgetting she’s got three dragons,” one red-faced man is saying. “I saw two of ‘em days ago. Huge, they were. They’ll make quick work of it.”

                “I heard he gave up the north when he didn’t have to,” says one of his companions dourly. “She’d already agreed to fight before he bent the knee.”

                “Eh, well I’d bet he bent the knee in another way to get her to agree to that!” the red-faced man replies, sticking out his tongue and flickering it suggestively. The other men guffaw.

                “Did you hear about Baelish?” another man asks. “Executed for treason by the Stark girls. He’s the reason Ned Stark lost his head. Rumour is it was the young one who killed all the Freys too. Told you poison’s a woman’s weapon. My wife’ll be putting it in my breakfast if I’m not home soon.”

                _You wife’s probably delighted to be free of you for a few hours_ , thinks Jaime.

 

An hour or so later, he takes a willing dark-haired woman to his room where he fucks her perfunctorily over a table. He finds the experience so mechanical, so charmless that he begins to doubt his own sanity and the sanity of everyone in the world who has made such a fuss over the act of coupling. _This_? This is what Rhaegar broke the kingdom apart for? This is what Robb Stark broke a promise and lost a war for? This is what he and Cersei risked their lives and their children’s lives for?  This is what his little brother lived for? Here Jaime stands, moving one part of his body in and out of part of this woman’s body. If that sounds reductive, well…

And, as a collection of body parts, the woman is tediously perfect. Small. Glossy hair. Flawless skin. Round breasts and buttocks. A neck as fragile as a baby bird. The kind of body men go crazy for because they get to feel dominant. She squeals and moans in a shrill ridiculous way, presumably in the hope of enflaming him and he is offended that she thinks he is so obvious as to be aroused by this. She thinks he is just like other men. Men who would feel powerful rather than patronised by the noise and the way she plays at being submissive.

Her loudness highlights the problem: the lack of danger. He is allowed to fuck this woman and it matters not if the whole inn hears. She is not his sister. She is not married to the king. She has not secretly borne his illegitimate children. As he feels himself softening inside her, Jaime resorts to strange measures. He imagines a horde of Northmen from downstairs realising who he is and rushing up the stairs to kill him for the crimes of his family. Or Cersei’s spies, crashing down the door to catch him in the act and drag him back to Kings Landing. The fear excites him and he finally manages to finish.

If the woman knows who he is, she does not say. “You fought in the war?” she asks as Jaime arranges his wet boots and breeches in front of the fire. “I’ve seen a few men like you, missing hands. Or feet. Fingers.”

He could tell her that these men were not like him. That he had more skill, more magic in his little finger than most men have in both hands, but the thought jars even as he thinks it. His loss does not have to be some golden, magical thing. It is of the same grim, sad, inconvenient variety that many others have suffered.

 -----------------------------------------------------

 

“Grease your horses’ hooves,” the old innkeeper tells them the next morning, after they have purchased a fair quantity of bread, hardboiled eggs, cheese, and meat from him. “Looks like you’re going quite a way. You don’t want the snow getting packed into the hooves. Have you food for them as well as for yourselves?”

“For them?” says Jaime.

“Yes, the horses…” says the innkeeper. He gestures to the snow. “There’s no grass for them…”

“Oh, I see.”

Bronn eyes him with exasperation, which Jaime thinks a bit rich since Bronn himself wasn’t exactly clamouring for the horses’ rations either. Jaime at least has the excuse that in a few short days he has witnessed a reanimated corpse trying to kill the love of his life, has himself swapped the love of his life and their unborn child for probable death in the North after almost being murdered himself by a reanimated corpse on his sister’s orders, and last night fucked a woman with dark hair.

“I’ll sell you some oats,” says the innkeeper, unaware of the existential crisis that is occurring before his eyes. “Grease their hooves while I get a sack, all right?”


	2. Chapter 2

The journey to Winterfell takes longer than Jaime would have hoped for. Probably, in his current state of dazed ineptitude, he had estimated a week or so based upon his largely quick progress across the Riverlands with Brienne all that time ago. This of course had been a mistake, for the Riverlands are not the North, summer is not winter, and Bronn is not Brienne, despite a certain similarity in name and a shared lack of deference for Jaime.

The daylight is sparse and the snow and impacted ice slows down the horses considerably. Unlike Brienne, who desired nothing more than to accept two sweet little girls in place of the self-satisfied, grimy captive who flirted with her one moment and insulted her the next, Ser Bronn of self-indulgence and the Blackwater is in no great rush. He is not prepared to ride through the night. He is not prepared to bed down in ramshackle barns or ditches and be off at dawn. He is not prepared to pass a brothel without ‘sampling its wares’. If they see an inn while there are still a couple of hours of daylight remaining, Bronn convinces Jaime that they must stop and take rooms because they might not pass another inn before dark, and if they do, it might be full.

While he mocks Jaime for shivering or cursing the cold as they are setting out in the morning, Bronn is always ready to play up the treacherousness of the northern landscape after a few hours of riding, and to stress the importance of finding shelter. It must be said that Jaime, cold, wet and in thoroughly bad spirits, does not take much convincing. He is willing to accept Bronn’s justifications that as they are off to do noble deeds, they deserve feather beds and good food, and that they will travel more efficiently on the morrow if well-rested and well-fed. The fact that their evenings are actually spent getting shitfaced drunk, gorging on food, losing money at the table and bedding women is left unsaid as they depart, bloated, nauseous and aching in the morning light.

Jaime thinks almost nostalgically of the days with Brienne, of thighs that ached from ceaseless riding, of mornings waking dew-drenched below the trees, of the dull throbbing in his head brought on by sleep deprivation rather than too much wine. They were not pleasant things but they had meant he was _getting somewhere_. Back to Cersei. His home. His freedom.

Jaime lies with four more women en route to Winterfell before accepting that Cersei has ruined him in this area as well as many others. The thrill is gone. It is like being made to paddle in a puddle after years of diving from the cliffs at Casterly Rock to do battle with the frothing, spewing waves that would have smashed him onto the rocks if only they could.

On the final two days of travelling, he is strict. They stop at no inns, eat only the food they have accumulated along the way, and bed down in a burnt out old cottage that has just enough walls and roof left to keep the worst of the snow and wind off them.

\----------

 

“This doesn’t bode well,” murmurs Jaime. His main worry about arriving at Winterfell had been the dragons, who he guessed would be guarding the castle. The black and red one had precious little reason to feel friendly towards either him or Bronn, and while Jaime did not fear death, he had no desire to be incinerated before anyone even realised he had made it here. If there was to be a record of his last movements, it was going to mention that he had honoured his vow, travelled north and either died fighting or been tried and executed for his crimes. It was not going to read “travelled north and then vanished somewhere near Winterfell. No one’s quite sure where he went. Perhaps he got lost?”

In fact, only two dragons swoop above the towers of Winterfell and they pay little attention to the throng of people at the gate that now includes Jaime and Bronn.

“No, it does not,” says Bronn, watching as a guard lets a family through the gate. “People don’t evacuate their homes in this weather for the fun of it. Ay!” he hails a woman near them. “Where you from?”

“Winter town.” The woman has a bundle and a little boy and she is busy rubbing his blue fingers between hers, trying to create warmth from nothing but four freezing hands.

“Why have you come here?” asks Jaime. “Has something happened down there?”

“You’ve not heard,” she says.

“Heard what?”

The woman looks at him, then placed her hands over her son’s ears on the pretence of warming them too. “The Others have breached the wall and are pouring through. Ravens have been sent to all the Northern houses telling them to take refuge here.”

Jaime’s stomach seems to drop a few feet. _Gods, no_.

The woman kisses her child. “Most have further to come than us, but this place will be packed in a few days.”

“What are you saying, woman?” says Bronn rather aggressively. “Don’t talk daft. That wall’s stood firm for thousands of years. Of course it’s not been bloody breached. It can’t have been.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” snaps the woman. “You’d better go and tell the King in the North that he’s sent a load of ravens and got everyone shitting themselves for nothing, hadn’t you? I’m sure the ex Lord Commander of the Night Watch will be thrilled to have two southerners who’ve never been near the Wall explain to him that it hasn’t been breached.”

“I’ve been beyond the Wall,” Bronn says lightly, his eyes fixed on the woman. Jaime sighs. The world might be about to end but _of course_ Bronn wants to fuck her. Of course he does. Bronn likes women who give as good as they get. They are alike in that way.

“Oi.” A guard looks Jaime over suspiciously. “What house you from then?”

“Lannister.” For years, Jaime had enjoyed bearing the name Lannister. Wealth, steeliness, power. All unearned by him but still his by way of his name. The dislike he could largely put down to envy. But what’s white without black? Day without night? Warmth without cold? Now, in the heart of the North, Jaime experiences the full shame of his name. Catelyn Stark’s slit throat. Talisa Stark stabbed through the belly. Robb, his head replaced by his wolf’s. Ned Stark’s head on a spike. Smoke gushing up where the sept stood. That young, dead direwolf. What was her name? Lady?

Truce or no truce, these deeds linger ghost-like between him and the Stark guard, and Jaime feels a wave of nausea that has little to do with the ale of last night.

“I need to speak to my brother,” he manages.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, I know I've taken ages to get to Brienne. I just felt like Jaime needed a bit of time spent on him given the huge (and very overdue) thing he's done.//

“I don’t suppose,” Tyrion says, looking at the small bundles of furs and food that Jaime and Bronn hold beneath their arms, “that there are a few thousand barrels of wildfire in those packs, brother? That might be more of a bargaining chip than the services of a one-handed man and an elderly sellsword.”

Jaime smiles grimly. “I’m not sure there was any left.”

“Yes, I suppose it was quite the conundrum,” says Tyrion. “Whether to use only part of the stash and risk some of her enemies surviving, or whether to use it all and face not having the means to commit mass murder again in the near future.”

Jaime and Bronn stand by a map table in a room off the Great Hall. Daenerys Targaryen sits, gazing at the line on the map that depicts the Wall. She has barely looked at them, indeed barely seems aware of any of them. Nearby are Jon Snow, Davos Seaworth, Tyrion, Sansa and, lingering in the shadows behind Sansa and looking much too thin, Brienne. Jaime finds his eyes flicking to her more than he would like but apart from the stunned look she gave him as he was escorted in, she has not met his gaze once. She looks white enough to faint and is without Oathkeeper and the armour he gave her, looking curiously fragile without them.

“I will vouch for Ser Jaime,” says Sansa. “When he was released by my mother, he saved Lady Brienne twice at great risk and personal cost to himself.” She glances at the golden hand. “He then kept his promise to my mother by arming Lady Brienne with my father’s Valyrian steel and sending her to protect me after I’d fled King’s Landing, despite his sister wanting me dead. I don’t believe he’s here on his sister’s orders. In any case, there is a way to see what the true situation is.” She gives her brother a meaningful look that Jaime doesn’t understand.

He again watches Brienne. Why isn’t she the one saying these things? Defending his honour? It occurs to Jaime that despite their obvious physical differences, Brienne and Daenerys are wearing the exact same look. Both have disappeared inside themselves; both determined neither to see or be seen. Jaime feels strangely hurt at being shut out like this; he had thought she would be pleased with him.

“It’s your decision, your grace.” Jon Snow watches Daenerys. Beside Jaime, Bronn shifts imperceptibly and the sound of a smile escapes him. Jaime sees it too. They are, after all, two men who spend far too much energy on women and they can recognise the symptoms in other men. Bronn would call it fucking. Jaime would call it love.

Daenerys comes back to them unwillingly and drearily. “Is it? Well, we agreed a truce and Ser Jaime is not to be blamed for his sister’s treachery. You may stay, Ser, but if you try to kill me again, I’ll have you roasted alive.”

Jaime has never liked receiving threats despite handing them out with abandon himself. “That reminds me,” he says, with killer instinct. “Where _is_ your third dragon?”

The look on her face is more than he could have hoped for, but he has only a brief moment to savour it as the memory of his men burning in their armour rises, before she speaks quietly. “With the Night King. Killed and resurrected as part of his army. His fire brought down the Wall.”

 

  * \- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -



 

Jaime has spent over two hours searching for Brienne. After his horrified reaction in the map room, the meeting had broken up rather quickly. Brienne had been the first to leave, again without so much as a look at Jaime, and by the time he had got to the door, she had disappeared completely.

He had a guard show him to her chamber but she was not there. He has checked the training yard, the armoury and the Great Hall, now full of people eating their evening meal. Tyrion had called to him, and while Jaime had refused the revolting-looking stew, he had accepted some ale. He found he understood now why his two siblings drank. After that, his search had rather lost focus and he had wandered any passages and peered into any rooms.

It is the warmth of the building that gives him the idea: the hot springs that are piped within the walls of Winterfell. Perhaps-

Dark has well and truly fallen outside and the air after the heat of the castle is cold and sharp as a blade. With a towel and lantern, he makes his way across the godswood to where three steaming pools lie. The glow from a lantern tells him that someone is indeed already there and he curses the snow that crunches beneath his boots and gives her warning of his approach. By the time he reaches her, she has chastely submerged herself to the chin, her eyes devastatingly beautiful in this light.

“My lady.”

“Ser Jaime.” Brienne’s clothes and towel are heaped beside the pool, and her eyes flit desperately between the heap and Jaime as he begins to remove his armour. Jaime feels a kind of savage pleasure that he can cause her this unease.

He weighs up the consequences of her decision for himself. If she gets out, he will see her naked body again and will have the right to demand why she is so intent on getting away from him. If she stays, he can, quite simply, be with her.

Brienne apparently decides that the cost of him seeing her unclothed is too great. She slumps back looking mutinous, and Jaime presses home his advantage, carelessly discarding his own clothes, turning to give her a view of his lovely arse, and pretending not to notice the one furtive look of his cock she allows herself as he enters the water. _Gods, that feels good._

He chooses his position carefully, not near enough to scare her off but not far enough to make her feel safe. He is starting to like that slightly edgy look in her eyes. It shows she doesn’t know what to expect of him, and that, along with the ale, makes Jaime feel rather reckless.

“Water always means a first for us, doesn’t it?”

She frowns. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean we both spent our first years by the sea. We made our first escape together via the Water Gate at Riverrun. You saved me for the first time on a river when Ser Robin tried to recapture me and I saved you for the first time when I pulled you back into the boat rather than knocking you out. Our first fight was in a brook; you nearly drowned me and we were recaptured. In Harrenhall bath, I made my first confession to you and saw you naked for the first time. And you held me in your arms for the first time.” He shifts closer, and scrapes a wedge of frigid snow from the bank, knocking it into the pool. Instantly it melts, reborn as steam. “Any ideas what we can do for the first time here, Brienne? I’ve got one.”

Below the water, his hand grazes her thigh. She jolts away. The lantern glow is too mellow to show colour, but Jaime knows that she will be scarlet. His eyes try in vain to capture hers.

She starts stammering, something about how he ought to behave with honour in the godswood even if he behaves boorishly everywhere else, and Jaime laughs. “Honour! I acted with honour when I shoved my sword in Aerys’ back. Much good it did me. Ned Stark acted with honour and look where it got him -though it certainly had my sister and Joffrey sitting pretty for a while longer. And I suppose Jon Snow acted with honour when he went off to capture his damn wight. That hasn’t done the world much good either, although it worked out well for the Night King. Funny how the ones who profit from honour are the ones who least deserve to.”

Finally, she meets his gaze, and it gives him courage. Too much courage.

He continues. “I acted with honour when I came north, and yet you wouldn’t even _look_ at me in there, surrounded as I was by enemies.”

“How were they enemies?” snaps Brienne. “Not one of them called for your head. You Lannisters are as paranoid as you are arrogant.”

Jaime waves this away, refusing to allow her to deflect the conversation to his shortcomings. “Why did you act as though we were strangers? I didn’t think you would be so deceitful, Brienne. We know each other as well as anyone knows anyone, don’t we? Well, almost… I’m ready to fill in that gap in our knowledge right now if you are.” He laughs at her flinch. He doesn’t know why he is being like this. Only knows he feels happy and desperate and angry and aroused all at the same time. He cannot predict what he will say or do next. The world is falling apart and he doesn’t know who he is anymore. “You cringe but I slept beside you after we left Harrenhall and you’re not always a quiet sleeper, my lady. I know what you have me do to you in your dreams.”

That does it. The accusation of deceit would have been enough, but the last bit is beyond anything she can bear. Eyes brimming with tears of mortification, Brienne makes a lunge for her towel and stands. Her nipples harden in the cold air and Jaime has a brief impulse to push forward and bury his face in the delicate place where her legs join. _What would she do_ , he wonders, half-awed. _Kill him? Would it be worth it? Better to die here in a steaming pool with his nose pressed against Brienne’s cunt than be ripped apart and arise with blue eyes in a few weeks having never got near it_. But in an instant, the woman is cocooned in her towel and out on the bank. She has become thin, and Jaime wants to ask her why she has not been eating properly.

“What do you want from me, Jaime?” she asks, and her voice shakes, with distress or fury, or both. “You rode north. Seven blessings on you. You rode north after staying with your sister when she’d murdered hundreds of innocents, after she’d driven _your own son_ to kill himself, after she’d seized the throne for herself, and after she sent you to wipe out Highgarden. You called it loyalty. Nothing less than the invasion of a one hundred thousand strong army of corpses could make you leave her, yet you expect me to fawn over you and vouch for your honour because at long last, _you rode north_. I can’t begin to describe my disappointment in you. You get it wrong, Jaime, again and again and AGAIN, and I’m finished with it.”

There is an awful stirring in Jaime’s heart. It feels like something immeasurably precious is dying in there. He opens his mouth to speak four times before managing words rather than gulps. “I want you-” he begins.

“And I need you,” she says, causing his eyes to widen briefly in hope, “to let me alone now. Please. There is too much to do here without fending off your crude advances as well. We are allies in this war, let us be satisfied with that.”

_Satisfied with that?_ Jaime watches Brienne push big feet into boots, before pulling her cloak tight around her body, still wrapped in towel. Years of ‘Kingslayer’ should have hardened him, but Jaime finds there is a world of difference between being condemned based on misinformation and being condemned based on truth. And a world of difference between being condemned by Brienne as opposed to by everyone else. Naked in this pool with her, he had not expected to be hurt like this. To be this ashamed. He cannot bear her rejection of him. He looks at her hulk of a body and his defences kick in. A steely rage comes over him.

“My crude advances? Surely you didn’t think I was in earnest, Brienne? That I wanted to mate with an ugly brute like you? I bedded five women on the way up here, and they would have fitted together under that cloak that just about covers your great bulk. Is it, in fact, a reconstructed tent? It must be hard to get things to fit, and you’re a paragon of practicality.”

Brienne stoops to pick up the rest of her clothes and her lantern. “Have no fear on that account, ser. Men like you using me as a joke or for a wager because I had the misfortune of being born big and ugly is nothing new to me.”

Then she leaves him, the snow creaking under her boots, her lantern glow growing fainter.


	4. Chapter 4

He is back in the map room with Brienne, Sansa, Bronn, Tyrion, Jon Snow, Ser Davos, and Brandon Stark. If Brandon Stark can still be called a boy. An unsullied soldier whose name Jaime does not know stands warming his backside by the fire.

“In fairness,” says Jaime, “when I offered myself as a military strategist and commander, I didn’t realise the invading army had an undead dragon and a commander who is a greenseer. How _in seven hells_ do we outthink, outflank and defeat an enemy that can see the past, present and future? Gods, he’s probably already seen us having this conversation. We don’t know what we’ll decide but he does!”

                Jon Snow glares at him across the map table. “What’s our alternative? Give up? We _have to_ stand and fight.”

                Jaime wants to overturn the table. Instead he brings his fist down on it. “Your heroics are what sent you north of the wall straight into a trap. Your queen’s heroics are what gave the Night King his dragon. If you hadn’t both been so busy trying to save the world perhaps you wouldn’t have doomed it. Yet you want to carry on in the same vein?”

                “Do you have a better idea, Ser Jaime?” says Davos placidly.

                Bronn clears his throat. “You say the future’s already set, right?” he says sheepishly to Jon Snow. He is, Jaime realises, embarrassed by the ethereal nature of the conversation. Good old Bronn. He will casually turn up to a meeting of highborn lords with a black eye, his face smelling of a woman’s wetness, and talking about the wart on his cock or the vulva he just licked, but give him the subject of greenseeing, prophecy and magic, and the man practically blushes. He is a man of the earth, not the ether.

                “I think that’s what my br -what Bran said,” says Jon. He regards the boy with unease, and Jaime cannot blame him. If Tyrion had undergone the kind of transformation into inhumanity that Brandon Stark has, would he, Jaime, have still been able to say ‘my brother’ without stammering over the words?

 _I should as soon refer to a library as ‘my sister’. The boy’s nothing more than an access point to information now. That’s my fault too, Brienne_. He looks tentatively over at her, but she is too deep in thought to notice. _Those eyes._

                Bronn continues. “So if this… this Night King bloke had seen himself getting beat by us in the future, he wouldn’t be coming south, would he? He’d carry on pottering about behind his wall and keep his head down. Just enjoy his life there. If he’s tramping all the way down here, he must have seen himself winning.”

                _Perhaps_ , thinks Jaime, _Bran is another reason she hates me now. She always knew I pushed the boy, but perhaps seeing him, really seeing what I did to him, made it real for her. She probably feels revulsion for me every time she hears his damn wheelchair trundling along the stones. Every time she looks at his white eyes, wasted legs and hears his monotonous voice._

                Jon Snow is unimpressed by Bronn’s attempts to bring the Night King into a more prosaic realm using semantics. “Pottering about enjoying life? We’re talking about the Night King. Not some nice old man who’s handed the farm down to his son so he can enjoy his twilight years. And he’s not tramping down here. He’s flying. His army is tramping. Without having to stop for food or sleep, I might add.”

                “Yeah, well, my point is, he must have seen himself winning,” says Bronn.

                Jaime thinks of Cersei. _Gold will be their shrouds_. “People try to cheat destiny. And in doing that, they cause the very thing they hoped to avoid. He might have seen himself losing. Perhaps he just thinks he can change it.”

                “That’s what we’re hoping,” says Sansa.

                “Didn’t anyone think to ask _him_?” snaps Bronn, gesturing to the motionless Bran with his eyes pale as the interminable snow. “Didn’t he tell you what was going to happen before he… went away?”

                Sansa shakes her head rather patronisingly. “He has every moment that has ever happened and ever will happen in that head. He’s still learning to control it. Perhaps that’s what he’s doing in there.”

                “Or perhaps he’s lost in there,” says Tyrion. “How long is it now?”

                “Since yesterday morning.”

                They all regard Brandon Stark with trepidatory wonder. Except Bronn. “Does he still piss when he’s like that?” he asks.

 

 

 

 

Jaime stands in the training yard watching as Brienne teaches a group of children who cannot be more than nine years old how to fight. Jaime is half amused, half horrified by the levity of the children; not one of them seems to realise the seriousness of their situation. To them, this is a jolly adventure with new friends and the chance to live in a castle. The boys are bursting with inept macho thrusts and jubilant arguments about which of them will be the one to stick his dagger in the Night King and carve out his black heart. The girls wield their weapons with more care and, surprisingly, more delight. Jaime supposes that when you have seen your whole future in your mother’s present -cooking greasy meat over a fire, mending your husband’s smallclothes, and drearily submitting as he pumps away at you in bed- the prospect of shaping your own destiny, of taking up weapons to fight and subdue others must be thrilling.

                Brienne gets angry only once. As the boys dream up evermore ‘Ramsay Bolton-esque’ punishments that they will rain down upon the Night King (by Jaime’s reckoning, the undead leader has now had his eyes gouged out, his balls chopped off and fed to him, his severed fingers inserted up his arse, and his liver made into a paste and smeared across his face), one little girl suggests that she might be the one to kill him. The boys howl with laughter and some even throw themselves down in the snow to roll about, determined to put the girl back in her place. But then Brienne’s voice cuts across them, sharp as the steel that hangs from her belt.

                “And what’s funny about that?”

                “She’s just a girl!” The boys are outraged that she needs to ask.

                “She is a girl,” Brienne agrees in a voice that makes the boys quail. “And so am I. So is Arya Stark. So is Queen Daenerys. How many men do you think lie rotting or burnt to ashes because they thought we were _just girls_?”

                The boys are silent for a moment. “A lot?” one finally hazard a guess.

                “A lot,” Brienne agrees crisply, and Jaime’s heart gives a strange, painful beat.

 

 

 

“Been looking for you.” Bronn is striding purposefully across the training yard. “What you staring at?”

                Jaime hurriedly averts his eyes from Brienne. “Nothing.”

                “Oh aye?” says Bronn. “Well, Nothing looks like she’s putting her sword away and headed for the Great Hall. Probably got fed up with you making frog-eyes at her. Come on, I’m famished. Maybe you can sit across the table from Nothing and pull her pigtails. Or give her a shiny apple and then run away.”

                “Why were you looking for me?” says Jaime through gritted teeth. He thanks the gods he did not tell Bronn about what happened in the pool. “Run out of people to annoy?”

                “Wondered if you knew owt about that.” Bronn gestures up to the green and bronze dragon that has just flown, screeching, above them. “No one else seems to or if they do they’re not saying.”

                Jaime is even more irritated. “Well, Bronn, that’s Rhaegal. He’s a drag-”

                “The other one!” snaps Bronn. “Where’s the big black one that its _mother_ rides? It’s not up there and she’s gone too.”

                “You think they tell me anything?”

 

 

 

                Bronn’s tendency to annoy only increases once they have entered the Great Hall. They are early so most of the tables and benches are still empty and Bronn ensures that he gets his stew ahead of Jaime before wandering off. Turning away from the serving girl with his bowl, Jaime is just in time to watch in mute horror as Bronn, grinning at him over his shoulder, strolls along to Brienne, plonks himself down beside her, and then calls to Jaime while gesturing to the seat across from them. “Come on, Jaime, you take the one near the fire. Warm up those ancient, creaking bones.”

                Jaime is frozen, forced to choose between the bizarre act of ignoring his jovial friend and sitting alone, or joining him and sitting across from Brienne. Brienne, whose leg he touched. Brienne, who sprang from the water after he tried to persuade her to be intimate with him. Brienne, who has not come near him since. _Oh, gods, gods, gods_. He chooses to sit with them only because he knows that if he doesn’t Bronn will start shouting across the hall at him to demand what he’s doing, and make the whole situation ten times worse.

                He drops squirming into the seat, and while he does not look directly at Brienne, her face is so pink it blazes like a sunburnt lobster in his peripheral vision. The pair sit there, cringing into their bowls, paying the overboiled carrots and onion far more attention than they warrant. Only Bronn looks happy.

                He turns grinningly to Jaime. “Tired?”

                “A bit,” Jaime mutters.

                “You should do Nothing tonight then. Just go to bed and… do Nothing.”

                Jaime reddens and Bronn turns to Brienne. Bronn has always had a slightly awestruck respect for Brienne. He would never speak to her the way he does Jaime and Tyrion.

                “Water?” he asks, holding the pitcher ready to pour her some.

                Brienne reacts as though he had offered her poison, snatching her cup away with a fierce “No!” She looks between Bronn and Jaime, clearly wondering if the pair have been discussing and laughing at what Jaime said the other night about water and the intimate scenarios it has created for them.

                “Blimey,” says Bronn, taken aback. “The lady does not like water. Cider then?”

                Seeing that his offer was genuine, Brienne looks a little less trapped. “Thank you.”

                Jaime has the sudden dreadful urge to laugh hysterically. It is a combination of nerves, amusement at Brienne’s ferocity and the whole world turning to shit. He searches desperately for something to say, unable to stand the tension anymore and aware that Bronn’s presence means she will at least have to be polite.

                “Do you like children, Brienne?” he flounders. _Idiot. What did you say that for?_

                Brienne frowns, still not looking at him. “What?”

                “I saw you -saw you teaching them before. Do you like them?”

                “That’s like asking me if I like _people_.”

                “Given children are people, it’s exactly like asking you if you like people.”

                “Then my answer is the same,” she says. “I didn’t like Stannis Baratheon or Randyll Tarly as adults. I imagine I would not have liked them as children either. I liked Catelyn Stark and I bet I would have liked her as a child.”

                “Gods, how bleak, Brienne. You don’t believe people can change then? Redeem themselves? A loathsome child will become a loathsome adult?”

                Brienne bites her lip. _Gods, it feels good to wind her up again. This must be why Bronn is always so light-hearted; roughly half of his life is spent winding up those around him._ “What I meant was that children are not all the same, as adults are not. Some I like, some I don’t.”

                “I thought women generally did like children,” says Bronn. “Seems a dreadful waste to spend your life pushing out, suckling and wiping jam off the little creatures if you don’t like them. And women become bears when their babes are in danger.”

                “There’s a difference between liking and loving,” says Jaime, as Brienne continues to avoid his gaze. “Love is less… reasonable.”

                “I think many women would consider their lives a dreadful waste,” Brienne says to Bronn, granting him both eye contact and a tone that doesn’t drip with hostility. Jaime considers upending the water pitcher or throwing his bowl at the wall. That would make her look at him. “I’ve trained women and girls the last few days. If we win this war -if enough of us survive- I don’t believe that the women will let things go back to the way they were before. The way they are now. They’re realising they can do what men do.”

                Jaime had seen it, Brienne working with the women. He’d been awed by the way they took the hits, the quickness with which they sprang up after being knocked down. He shouldn’t have been surprised. These women had borne children. Probably been knocked about by husbands or fathers. They knew pain.

He thinks of Brienne and Cersei with their one shared trait: fury at being born women. What does it make Jaime that he has been so in thrall to the pair of them? That every time he watches Brienne fight, he wants to get inside her? That, even as he had charged Daenerys Targaryen on the Goldroad, he had grudgingly admired her for risking the arrows and bolts and coming into battle with her men? That he had laughed when he heard who had brought Winter to House Frey?

                “Brienne,” he says. It is worth a try. “You must like children or you wouldn’t waste your time training the younger ones.”

                “Waste my time? What -you’d have them left defenceless?”

                “You must know that they don’t stand a chance in combat. Your training them will achieve two things at best: that they feel a little less helpless in their final moments, and that they take one or two wights with them, if they’re lucky. You’re simply preparing those little children for slaughter.”

                Now she looks at him. Those eyes. Gods, the things he wants to do to her. This is becoming a recurring theme now. Brienne does something, anything, and he imagines being between her legs.

                “You’ve said a lot of deeply hurtful things to me over the years but I think that’s the nastiest.”

                “I wasn't trying to be hurtful or nasty this time,” says Jaime quickly.

                “As opposed to all the other times when you were?” Her voice breaks slightly and she takes a long drink.

                Damn. Is she still thinking of the stupid quip he made in the pool? About the women he’d been with fitting under her cloak? About not wanting someone as ugly as her? But for pity’s sake, he has called her ugly countless times and she never seemed to care. Jaime studies her face and cannot quite rid himself of the impression that this time something is different. Something has snapped. He could apologise. He could say he is sorry, and that he hadn’t meant anything. That he is an idiot.

But then, unbidden, comes the image of Cersei. Cersei, slamming doors. Refusing to speak to him. Slapping his face. Making a hobby out of taking offence and creating a five-act tragedy if he used the wrong word to describe her dress or style of hair. And he had grovelled, begged and comforted her like an idiot every time. And now here is Brienne as well, creating drama from nothing. Playing the victim and casting him as the villain. And she is so guileless that she makes a much better victim than Cersei, which naturally renders him more of a villain. She has got him strung tighter than Cersei ever managed. He will not be an idiot again, will not apologise when he has done nothing wrong. He will not spend his final days being manipulated.

“Don’t be so bloody soft, Brienne.” His voice is harsh and Bronn grimaces. “All I meant to say was that if you really wanted to save those children, you’d head south with them, get on a boat, and take them somewhere safer than here. An island. I’m being serious. You should do it.”

Bronn splutters. “She can’t do that. What mother would allow it? A legion of children going off with one woman? Pardon, m’lady, but they’d all freeze or be murdered. And the Night King isn’t bound to the land anymore, you might remember. There are no safe islands.”

“Freeze? There’ll be abandoned inns and houses for shelter all over the place by now. Brienne beat the Hound. She could protect them. And what mother wouldn’t prefer a chance at life for her child rather than certain death? She wouldn’t take all of them anyway. Better a tiny number survive than none at all. Just a little group.” _Just enough to make her go somewhere safe while thinking she was doing something worthy._

                “Oh aye. And how are you going to determine which lucky children get to go off with Aunt Brienne to this wonderful island? Are you going to hold a little child tourney and the winner and runner up get to leave? Or draw lots? Or -or what?”

                “If you’ve quite finished determining what I can, can’t, should and shouldn’t do…” snaps Brienne. “I am no one’s aunt and I shan’t be going off to any islands. Except Tarth, by myself, if the gods are good. I can cope with a couple of hours of children and their yammering. Anymore than that and I should probably murder them all myself anyway. If Ser Jaime knew me at all, he’d no more imagine me patiently leading children through the snow than he would imagine me singing sweet songs as I tried on a new frock. Perhaps he should leave with this small group of, as yet, unspecified children he is so determined should be saved.”

                They glare at one another, and Bronn, casting his eyes about for something to break the unpleasant silence, settles upon one of the serving girls. Very young, very pretty, and very clearly taken with Jaime.

                “Well, there’s one that would go with you, Jaime.” He jerks his head, and Jaime glances over to see the girl smiling at him. “She must be about 16 so I’m not sure if she qualifies for a place on your expedition, but she certainly looks like she’d like to be saved by you. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a visit from her tonight. Impending death can make people act weirdly.”

                Brienne crams the last of her bread into her mouth and leaves the table without a word.

                “What did you say that for?” Jaime demands.

                “You’re welcome… I was helping you. Nothing gets a woman wetter than knowing other women are wet for you. And I don’t know if you noticed, but she really doesn’t like you right now.”

                “Well, thank you, Bronn,” says Jaime. “Thank you so much. I assumed she’d leapt up from the table and run off because you just made her hate me a bit more, but I’m glad to know that it was actually because she was so wet she was about to soak through her breeches. Not that it matters,” he adds hastily.

                “Oh yeah, I can tell by your scowling red face that it doesn’t matter at all.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaime pulls himself together

It was Meera Reed who enlightened them. Standing in the map room, with the snow only just beginning to melt on her cloak and hair after the journey from Greywater Watch, she had listened as Tyrion explained the current situation with Brandon Stark, before telling them what the boy had told her of his visions.

“There were three things,” she had said, looking at the still-lost Bran. “Three things that shouldn’t have happened if these were just... visions.” She had spoken of the silver fingerprints on Bran’s wrist which had brought down the army of dead men upon them. Of a stable boy whose mind was broken by the knowledge of his death. Finally, she spoke of a young man -a man whose wife and babe were thousands of miles away- racing towards his sister’s screams, but turning suddenly as he heard the word _father_.

“Ned Stark couldn’t _see_ Bran?” Tyrion has asked.

“No,” Meera had said. “Bran said he thought his father put it down to the wind or something. After a few seconds he carried on up the tower steps to his sister and the baby.”

 _The baby_. With the introduction of those two little words, time in the room had almost seemed to stop. No one spoke, no one moved. Only the flickering of the snow at the window and flames in the grate betrayed the fact that time was marching on, bringing the dead closer.

“Bran did tell you about her baby?” Meera had said at last.

“No,” Sansa had said.

One by one, every pair of eyes in the room had found their way to Jon Snow.

Jaime noticed that the only people who did not seem surprised by any of this were Daenerys, Samwell Tarly, and Jon himself.

\----------------------

 

 

Now Jaime stands in the crypts holding his lantern aloft.

“I’m sorry, am I intruding?” he asks coolly.

Daenerys is in front of the statue of Lyanna Stark. Lyanna Targaryen. How Robert would have raged at that.

“No.” She turns to regard him. “I came to meet my sister-in-law.”

“And what do you think of her?” he asks. “Now you’ve met her?”

Daenerys’s tone is dry. “She’s a little colder than I would have hoped for. A little quieter. What business do you have in the crypts?”

Jaime hesitates. The truth is he isn’t entirely sure what he means by being here. “Shouldn’t you have guards?” he asks suddenly. “What if I had been sent by Cersei to kill you? What if one of the Northmen decides to make you pay for your father’s sins? You should have guards.”

Daenerys shifts her own lantern to illuminate the space behind them, and Jaime sees a huge white direwolf. The queen seems to have a thing for animals that could snap her in half if they had half a mind to. “When you first arrived, Bran Stark confirmed your story,” she says. What business do you have in the crypts?”

Jaime replies in kind, lifting his lantern to illuminate the statue of Ned Stark.

“The Lannisters and Starks hated each other,” she says.

“So they did.”

“Have you come to make your peace?”

“Something like that,” he murmurs. “It’s strange, I disliked him for being so honourable, so righteous. Now I find that he was even better than I thought him to be, and rather than hate him the more for it, I find myself softening towards him. His wife was a tiger. Her claws would have been out when he brought that boy home. I always assumed the two ways in which I was superior to Ned Stark were in my fidelity and my ability to accept condemnation for a good deed. But no, he matched me there too.”

  Jaime suddenly remembers who he is talking to. He turns away self-consciously.

 “It was he who found you after you broke your vow and killed my father?”

 “Yes,” he says. “There were a lot of vows.”

 “Which you didn’t keep.”

“Which none of us kept. We swore to protect your mother yet we stood guard outside her room as she cried in pain while your father raped her. I very much wanted to keep my vow to her then, but Jonothor Darry -my brother of the Kingsguard- stopped me.”

Daenerys looks as though she has been struck. All the breath and coolness knocked out of her. She suddenly seems very young.

“Ah,” says Jaime. “Now you think perhaps I should have slit his throat a bit sooner. There’s a difference, isn’t there, between knowing that your father was going to incinerate tens of thousands of faceless citizens who mean nothing to you and knowing that he raped, scratched and chewed on your mother as a dog would on a hambone.” More gently, he adds, “I imagine a girl sold to a Dothraki horse lord knows what abuse is.”

“My brother taught me what abuse is,” she says. “As your sister did Tyrion.”

“Did my brother talk a lot about Cersei?”

 “He talks a lot about both of you,” she says, with a knowing look. “You and I are not so different.”

 “How so?”

“We’ve both lost ourselves in these strange times. I was Daenerys Targaryen, Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons, the rightful queen of the seven kingdoms. Now what am I? Jon Snow -my nephew -is the rightful king. What a joke fate played there! My dragon is dead and I greatly fear my other two will join him before this war is done. I reformed the slave cities using my dragons as a show of force, quashing rebellion after rebellion; without _them_ , even if I survive, all those I freed will be put back in chains. As for Protector of the Realm -Viserion brought the Wall down. My legacy -it will not be a good one.”

“In comparison, my loss of self looks trifling,” says Jaime drily, holding his stump up.

“I wasn’t thinking of your hand,” Daenerys says.

“Then what?” Jaime is surprised.

“Your brother often told me that you would have sacrificed anything to protect your sister and him. That you loved, recklessly and wholeheartedly. You attacked Ned Stark in the street when Tyrion was captured. Told your father you would take a wife if he would spare your brother, and you set him free when that failed. You joined the Kingsguard, gave up Casterly Rock and pushed a boy out of a window for your sister. Stayed faithful to her though she cheated on you. Everything you did you did for them. You lost your brother when he betrayed you by murdering your father and joining me. And now you’ve lost your sister. Tyrion says you are very changed.”

Jaime stares at her as she continues, “You and I, we both put all our efforts into what we deemed important. We’ve both done good and terrible things to those ends, but we’ve still lost everything we fought for, haven’t we?”

He cannot speak for some minutes and Daenerys continues to study Lyanna Targaryen’s stone face.

When he does speak it is to ask her how she can speak so candidly to him, a man she hardly knows. A man who had been her enemy until so recently.

“I expect one or both of us will be dead soon,” she says. “And I’ve spent my life holding everything in -for fear of provoking my brother to violence as a child, and for fear of showing weakness as a queen.”

“Perhaps things will not go as badly as you think,” he says.

She glances at his stump. “How did it happen?”

“Didn’t my brother tell you? You seem to know everything else.”

“Only that your sister was far less enamoured with you when you returned home without it.”

“I was trying to protect Lady Brienne,” he says quietly.

 “Ah...”

 Jaime could let that small sound go, but he doesn’t want to. He wants someone to say this thing out loud even if he doesn’t dare say it himself. “Ah?” he asks. “Ah what?”

But the young woman is already urging the wolf to her heel. “Your brother will be waiting for me.”

\------------------------------------

 

 

Brienne is sitting by the fire in her chamber, thinking of her brother and sisters, when there is a knock on her door. She is remembering the tears that pricked at her own eyes as Jon Snow walked through the gates of Winterfell and saw Arya and Bran for the first time. His whole face had seemed to collapse. He hadn’t even been able to move. Arya had had to go to him, cradling his face with hands that had made so many men regret crossing the Starks. 

“Come in,” Brienne says.

_What would I have been if I had been allowed to keep them? If I had grown with my brother and sisters by my side? My father would have had heirs. I should have had three people in the world so used to me that I would not have to witness them recoil just a little every time they saw me. We would have sailed and swum together. Collected shells. Climbed to Peak Rock together every time there was a gale to feel the salt spray and watch the thirty-foot waves racing in. Laughed together at meal times. Jumped through the waterfalls at the ice pool. Played chase up and down the passages. Laughed at Septa Roelle instead of listening and believing her. Perhaps I would have been less serious. Less prickly. But then I suppose not all siblings get on._

The very evidence of that fact now walks into her room, shutting the door behind him. Jaime, eternally caught between two warring siblings.

Brienne is brought back from Tarth and the childhood she should have had with a jolt. She scrambles up from the furs where she had sat cross-legged, and rearranges her night gown. She had expected Sansa or Arya. Maybe one of the women she had trained today. Even Missandei or Daenerys. She had not expected a damn man to walk in, but even as she blazes at his lack of decorum, she sees the look on his face.

“What’s the matter? Are they here? The dead?” She rushes to her window but the night is too black to see anything.

“No, no,” he says. “Nothing like that.”

Brienne turns to face him slowly. She wants to ask him if anyone saw him come in here, but to do so would hint at his impropriety, and that would raise the issue of why it is improprietous for a man to come to a woman’s chamber at this time of night. Brienne wants to keep away from that particular topic. She can just imagine his response: “Don’t worry, even the northerners aren’t dim enough to think I’d want to be between your legs.” Or maybe: “Yes, about fifty people saw me come in... so how about it? Might as well now…”

In fact, Brienne finds she is reluctant to speak at all, knowing how acerbic Jaime can be when the mood takes him. She will answer his questions, of course, but she will be careful to give him nothing he can make a joke of or hurt her with. He is the one who has come to her; he must be the one to break the silence. With a resolute set to her mouth, she waits.

But Jaime seems to lack his usual eloquence tonight. He scans the room, gulps, rubs at his beard, and opens and shuts his mouth several times before gesturing to the plate on her table and saying, “You ate your meal up here tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

_Because, strangely, I feel less lonely when I am alone than when I am surrounded by families: mothers and fathers holding children in their laps and cutting up the meat for them; husbands caressing their wives’ hair; brothers allowing sister the larger bit of bread. People are so unbearably tender when death lurks near._

“I felt a little unwell.” It was true enough, her spirits did not feel well.

“Should I fetch a maester?”

“No. No.” Brienne doubts that the maesters would appreciate being called away from the numerous cases of frostbite they are dealing with to cater to her bout of maudlin self-pity.

 “You don’t look very well,” he says, moving to touch her forehead.

Brienne takes a sharp step back; Jaime’s hand snaps back to his side and he looks quickly to his feet.

_I never look well, Jaime. I never can._

“I’m fine now,” she says, at the same time as he mutters “sorry.”

Jaime wanders over to the window, then to the table, then back to the fire. Brienne watches him helplessly.

“Do you struggle to sleep at night here?” he finally manages. “We southerners aren’t used to such cold, are we? Bronn swears he’ll freeze to death in his bed before the dead get here.”

“I’ve grown used to it. The hot springs help.” She blushes at the mention, but thankfully he does not pick up on it. Apparently, he is as eager as she not to recall their conversation in the pool.

“Do you think you will have your own chamber for much longer?” he asks. “With more people arriving every day?”

“I doubt it. It’s an advantage I savour while it is left to me.”

He casually picks up a stocking that she had left on the floor, and hangs it before the fire. “What were you doing, before I disturbed you?” he asks.

“I was -I was just thinking.”

“What about?”

Brienne puts another log on the fire to give herself time to consider. “Tarth. My brother. My sisters.”

“You told me when we first met that you were your father’s only child.”

_You remember that? I thought you were too overcome with mirth because I started to describe myself as my father’s only son._

“Brienne?” he persists.

“They died.”

“When? How?” he asks, looking at her with such a look of mingled curiosity and tenderness that Brienne almost squirms. She does not want this. She has always felt that because she cannot remember her mother and sisters and because she barely remembers her brother that her feelings of loss are not legitimate. She has no memories of loving them, except Galladon. She is in the strange position of missing what she has never had, of having made her way through life with four people-shaped gaps beside her, and no idea what the people who should fill them would be like. It is a dreary, empty kind of grief, and Brienne does not feel she deserves sympathy for it.

Trying to be brusque, she says, “My little sisters died still in their cribs. I don’t remember them. My brother drowned when he was eight.”

“Do you remember him?”

Brienne hesitates. “The unhappy thing is, I remember his death more vividly than his life. I remember them lifting his body out of the shallow waves, and carrying it up to Evenfall. We’d crept out to swim on our own, and when he got into difficulties I ran for help instead of going after him. I was only four. And by the time I brought the men back, he’d been washed into the shallows. I remember thinking, ‘Well, his face looks all wrong, but at least he’s not lost out there. Maester will fix him when we get him back, the way he fixes my toys.’ They carried his body back, and I ran along beside, chattering to him. It still didn’t occur to me that I had made the wrong decision by running for help instead of following him myself. Then we got back to the hall and I saw my father’s face, and-” She has to stop then.

Jaime doesn’t say a word, just looks at her, and Brienne remembers her resolution to give him nothing he can hurt her with. She might as well have resolved to fly for all the power she has to stick to her resolutions in Jaime’s company. She has offered up, completely unnecessarily, one of the worst experiences of her life.

She begins to busy herself by taking the furs that she had earlier heaped by the fire back to her bed. She could easily have lifted them all at once, but she makes a long task of taking them one by one and spreading them out neatly, occasionally yawning. The practical nature of the task soothes her and the implication should be clear - _I’m tired, I’m going to bed, please go now_ -but Jaime doesn’t move. He just watches her and Brienne feels what a shambling creature she is. Bigger and more bestial than the animals whose pelts now adorn her bed. If she wrapped one around herself to step into the snowy courtyard, probably a hail of arrows would shoot her down as the archers wondered how a bear had gained access to the castle.

“Why didn’t I know that?” he asks. “About your brother?”

You’d probably have said he drowned himself to keep from having to see my ugly face or something, Brienne thinks.

Aloud, she says, “I haven’t even told the people I’m close to.”

Jaime flinches. “Oh,” he says quietly. “You don’t consider us close then?”

It takes Brienne a moment to work out what he has taken exception to. “Well,” she begins, vexedly running a hand through her hair, “I mean -well, I meant the people near me. The people I see daily. Pod, Lady Sansa, Lady Arya. I haven’t told -haven’t talked about it with any of them.”

She stares very hard at her bed, wishing she were in it, hidden away from the world, from Jaime, under the layers.

“Brienne-”

“I’m tired, ser, it’s been a -a very long day.”

“Of course, but…”

“You’re not here to learn about my family, Jaime. You want something, and you’re stalling desperately so it must be something big. You know if I have the power to help you, I will. Do you want the return of your sword? Or the promise of a pardon from Jon Snow if the living win? To keep Casterly Rock?”

“I want you to marry me,” he says.

Brienne’s heart seems to stop. She forgets to breathe. All the blood rushes from her head, though she is not sure where it is gone because it doesn’t seem to be in her legs or arms either. They are as weak as water. Blindly she gropes for the stool behind her and falls down onto it. Grips the table with clammy fingers. She would think this a joke except that Jaime’s face has gone a kind of sickly grey, and she is watching him stuff his left hand into his pocket to hide the fact that it is trembling. She doesn’t understand and she is too shocked to even start trying.

A long, dreadful minute passes, and Jaime finally says with a choked laugh, “Well, this wasn’t exactly the response I’d hoped for.”

Still Brienne can’t speak. All language has deserted her and she wants to claw at herself for being so slow-witted. Not content to look like some huge animal, she has to have the linguistic skills of one too. The cognitive skills. She is nothing but primitive fear and blind panic. Perhaps she should grunt at him or growl or swipe him with a paw.

More time passes.

“Brienne,” Jaime begins again, but Brienne shakes her head at him so desperately that he contents himself with coming toward her, kneeling at her feet, and wiping tears from her face that she didn’t even know were there. If this is meant to calm her, it has quite the opposite effect, but she cannot find the strength to stand up or even to knock his hand away. She is shaking and he is not much better.

Brienne finally manages to work her thoughts into some coherent framework. The fact that those thoughts are mainly the ones planted by her vicious septa is less helpful, but at least she once again has thoughts.

“Do you want Tarth?” she whispers.

“Tarth?! Gods, no!” He sees her slightly affronted look and hastens to add, “I’m sure it’s very beautiful, but no.”

“Then you think you’ll be safer after this war, married to a Stark ally?”

Jaime is on his feet and away from her quicker than she had thought possible. “Don’t, Brienne. It’s costing me all the courage I have to say this to you; please don’t say you think I’m such a coward I would ask you to marry me to save my own measly skin. Or so mercenary I would marry you to acquire land.”

“But it’s what people do,” says Brienne. “They -they marry to secure their positions.”

“It’s not what I do.”

No, Brienne supposes, it isn’t. She drops her face into her hands, feeling a new fear taking root inside her.

He presses on. “If I managed to avoid marrying for political expediency while Tywin Lannister was alive, do you really think I’d do it once he was dead?”

“Then why do you do this?” she bursts out.

Once again, he comes to her and kneels at her feet. “You know why, Brienne.”

“No. No, I don’t.”

“You would have me say it then? Do you want me to say it?”

Brienne feels a fright she has never felt before. “Just -no, Jaime, think. Instead of rushing on, and doing something stupid or saying something you’ll regret, _think_. You’re far from home. You’re -you’re lonely. Whatever you think you feel now, it isn’t necessarily-”

“I’m in love with you,” he says, with a rush of his old defiance. “I’m in love with you and there is nothing you can do to stop that. You can’t reason me out of it. You can’t make me pretend not to be. You can’t pretend this is just a whim, because we both know it’s been going on for years. And you can’t tell me you don’t love me too, because I know you do.”

There is another long awful pause while Brienne tries once again to gather her scattered wits. Jaime takes the opportunity to rise up on his knees and kiss her. Not one kiss, but a dozen, strewn like curses across her lips, her nose, under her eyes, across her cheeks and forehead. Each one bewitching and rendering her more defenceless, than the last. She hates that her strength -all that strength that should be locked away in her muscles -has gone. She doubts she would be able to fight off a rabbit in her current state.

“This isn’t right,” she tries to tell him. The fact of Jaime -Jaime who seems half god, too beautiful, too golden to be cut from the same cloth as any mortal man -kissing a graceless beast like her feels dreadfully wrong. _Why is he doing this? We are barely the same species._

“This is utterly right,” he whispers back. “Don’t send me away. Don’t make me stop.”

There is a light knock on the door, and Sansa’s voice, almost inaudible. “Brienne, are you awake?”

Jaime jolts away and looks at her, his eyes glinting in the firelight. Mutely, he holds her chin and shakes his head at her. Brienne has the distinct feeling of being an animal in a trap with Jaime’s eyes on her like that. Right now, she has the power to stop this, to get herself out of it. But if she stays silent, if she lets Sansa go away, she does not want to think what could happen in the next few minutes.

“Yes, I’m awake” she manages to say.

“May I come in?”

“Yes.” She tries to push Jaime away and up but he doesn’t budge, a ten-tonne sack of obstinacy and disappointment. The result is that upon entering the room, Sansa is met with the sight of Brienne, still flushed of face, still rather teary and still in her night gown, but now standing a foot from the stool, where Jaime still kneels, looking upset.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m interrupting.”

“No, no, you’re not,” says Brienne. “Please, Jaime,” she whispers.

Jaime clambers up, looking between Brienne and Sansa with more than a little anxiety. For a moment, Brienne thinks he will refuse to leave, but after a second, he bows his head to Sansa and walks to the doorway.

“Don’t think this conversation is over,” he tells Brienne as he steps through and closes the door behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To me, Jaime is a character pretty much summed up by “the things I do for love.” I think he’s almost entirely motivated by love, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that George R.R. Martin has spelt his name to be the same as the French "J’aime", meaning "I love". I feel like Jaime has tried to bury that huge part of himself over my other chapters. After all, it got him hurt a lot. Here, he’s getting himself back, with a bit of a reminder from Tyrion via Daenerys.


	6. Chapter 6

When Brienne goes up to her room the next evening, Jaime is already sitting on the floor outside her door. Her first instinct when she rounds the corner and sees him there is to turn and flee, but he is already getting to his feet, his eyes fixed on hers. She forces herself forward and unlocks the door, grimacing slightly.

Jaime does not ask her permission to enter, but follows her in, shutting the door behind him. Brienne watches as he moves about the room, lighting candles with the flame from his lantern, smoothing down furs on the bed, and picking up the night gown that Brienne dropped on the floor that morning. He seems, she thinks, less agitated than last night.

When he is done, he stands before her, inspecting her in the same proprietorial way that he just attended to her room. “You look different.”

“Since you last looked at me a minute ago?” Brienne’s attempt at flippancy falls flat.

“Since the dragonpit. You’re paler. And much thinner. Your freckles have faded.” He makes it sound like a reprimand. As though Brienne’s body -including freckles, muscles and tan- belongs to him and she has let him down by allowing it to waste away. Brienne feels a stab of annoyance. He is already thinking of her as his property.

“There hasn’t been much sunshine recently.”

“That only explains the freckles. Have you been eating properly?”

She hasn’t. Not since that day in the dragonpit. Nor has she slept properly. In sleep now, Brienne finds herself back at Evenfall, in her four-year-old body. The place is decaying and quiet, as though no one has been there for years. Cobweb. Dust. Motheaten curtains. She knows there is someone there though. Someone who has been waiting for her. Someone who wants her to join him. When Galladon appears, slinking out from the nursery, Brienne is always rooted to the spot. No matter how many times she has the dream, the moment when she sees him will never cease to horrify her. Sometimes his eyes are red and puffy, like the eyes of the undead Gregor Clegane, and she knows that she got her wish; that the maester ‘fixed’ him after his drowning. Sometimes he has the blue eyes of a wight. The rotting flesh. The visible bones. He rasps in the same way as that wight too, and Brienne wonders if that is how her brother sounded as he died. Trying to drag air from water like a fish. She runs. He comes after her. She wakes. Gasps as though surfacing from the sea and not a dream. There is no relief in wakefulness because worse is coming for them all.

Her appetite has become a small, mean thing that wins the battle over Brienne’s pragmatism - _you’re getting weaker,_ _you need to eat_ \- at every mealtime. It is hard to shove nourishment down your throat when you feel faintly nauseous all the time. Her muscles cry out now from the day’s labour where months ago she would barely have felt it. It has put her in no sweet mood.

“I’ve lived two and a half decades without a mother, Jaime. I hardly need you to take on the role now.”

“The role of mother wasn’t the one I was hoping for.”

“Septa then?” says Brienne. “She liked telling me what to eat too, though the message was less not more. And she’d have been delighted by the loss of freckles rather than scolding me for it. Still, she was as ready as you to attack me for my ugliness.”

 Jaime visibly flinches. “Don’t. Brienne, I haven’t said that in years-”

 “The other day in the pool,” she says calmly.

 He flounders. “I- I was hurt. I lashed out.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. How is it that he can strip her of all anger just by looking at her like that? As though she has wounded him and not the other way round? “I shouldn’t have said that. Forgive me.”

Jaime does not look convinced. “Shall I make you a fire?” He gestures to the small heap of wood that lies beside Brienne’s cold hearth. “But perhaps you want to save it for the morning? I don’t suppose we’ll be getting anymore now.”

Brienne shakes her head and moves to the window. Just beyond the walls of Winterfell, there are bobbing pinpricks of light from the torches carried by the men out there. “It will all have to go towards the stockades now. Those men will be building all night, we’ve so little time left.” She pulls her cloak closer to her body, feeling the chill from the window. “I spent all day down in the wood, chopping down trees and loading them up for the horses to bring back. A young man in our group -he cut down a tree that had stood for three or four hundred years, Jaime. He was thrilled with himself. Thrilled for taking something that in hundreds of years, no one else had.”

The sight of that young man’s triumph had chilled Brienne more than she could at first comprehend. While she and the other men had used their axes to bring down the tall, supple trees as quickly and efficiently as possible, this man -boy, really- had detached himself from the group and disappeared from sight. He had spent the entire morning bringing down this one beast of a tree with its gargantuan, moss-covered trunk and great snaking branches. It was pointless, the other men had fumed at him when they saw, because the horses couldn’t possibly take it back in one piece, and sawing it into manageable chunks would take much too long. He had, they grumbled, wasted his entire morning.

For Brienne though, it wasn’t the waste of a morning that brought a clammy misery down on her or prevented her from meeting the eye of any man for the rest of the day. It was, she realised, after some time, the wager. Or The Wager, as it had become in her head. The sworn knights in the Tarly camp who had bet on which of them could take her virginity, growing ever more forceful in their attempts. It was, Brienne considered, always the same: men determined to stick their implements -whether that be their swords, axes, spears or cocks -into anything that presented itself as a challenge -whether that be another man, an ancient tree, a wild boar, or an inexperienced woman. For Brienne, the idea of being fucked was inextricably wound up with the idea of being conquered, impaled. There were the knights who had bet on her. Soldiers in the camp who bragged loudly about what acts they had pushed reluctant tavern girls into. The many men who had tried to rape her. And her betrothed who had outlined the many feminine pursuits she would have to take up once married to and claimed by him. She could not imagine herself being taken by a man without also imagining his gloating smile at having subjugated her.

“Burning stockades will slow the dead down, true enough,” Jaime is saying. “We do need to create choke points given the size of their army. Let’s hope we don’t need to evacuate the living quickly though.”

 Even Jaime, Brienne thinks, as she sits down on the edge of her bed. Even Jaime who talked scathingly about boys liking a challenge. _He still couldn’t help telling me that he was strong enough to pin me down._

“They won’t be long now,” he says, sitting down beside her. “The survivors from Eastwatch arrived today and the dead can’t be far behind though they’re on foot rather than horseback. Did you -? Brienne…? Are you listening to me at all…?”

 Brienne blinks at him and forces herself to focus. “It won’t be long now, survivors from Eastwatch, dead can’t be far behind,” she parrots.

 “That’s not the same as listening,” says Jaime fondly and Brienne can’t help smiling at him. His constant need for attention is ridiculous and she will never understand it.

 He gazes at her long enough to make her blush, and then asks, “Have you -have you thought about what I said, last night?”

_Oh no. Shouldn’t have smiled at him. Should have actually listened when he was talking about battle. Choke points. Outflanking manoeuvres. Dragonglass-tipped scorpion bolts._

 “About-”

 “About marrying me,” he says.

 “No. Well. A bit,” she concedes, fidgeting desperately with her tunic sleeves in her lap. He places his hand on hers to still them.

 “What are your thoughts?”

 “I think that-” she begins. “Ser Jaime, the-”

“Jaime.”

 “Jaime. The first time I ever met you was with Lady Catelyn when you were chained up. You offered to -to service her. Told her to slip out of her gown and you’d see what you could do. And then as my captive in the Riverlands, you said- similar things to me. And again the other night in the pool in the godswood.” Brienne wishes she could stop her voice from faltering. Stammering from girls who look like girls is one thing. Brienne can feel her own bigness, the callouses on her hands from wielding an axe and saw all day, can see her sword and suit of armour standing in the corner; no blush or stammer is ever going to sit prettily on her. “I think,” she pushes on, “that when you are trapped somewhere away from your sister, you can’t cope. You get bored and lonely and you needle away at whoever is near you, because you miss her so. Perhaps you get crude because you miss her intimacy, I don’t know. But I do know that you tease and play and make a joke of everything, and last night was just that taken too far. Perhaps you didn’t even realise you were doing it, but you weren’t being serious. You just needed to fill the gap she has left.”

His hand pulls away from hers and he is silent for so long she is forced to look up from her lap to see his face. To say he looks displeased is an understatement. “Have you quite finished?” he says. “Can I respond?”

“Yes.”

“I’m fourteen years older than you, vastly more experienced and I’ve been in love with you for years, even when my sister was there, yet you want to cast me as some volatile idiot who doesn’t know his own mind just to save your own skin?”

“To save my own skin?”

“Yes. If you let yourself believe me, you’d have to make some decisions, wouldn’t you? Assuming we survive all this. You’d have to consider living a life that you tried to rule out years ago. A man in your bed. Maybe children. Much easier to pretend it’s your moral duty to turn me down, and to carry on grovelling and running glorified errands that you call quests for people who have less courage and goodness in their whole bodies than you do in your little finger.”

Brienne sits frozen. She doesn’t have a clue how to respond to any of this, so she acts as if she has not heard. She gets up from the bed, takes a bottle of oil from her mantlepiece, tips a few drops onto a leather cloth, and sits down by the empty fireplace to polish Oathkeeper, her face hidden. This goes on for several minutes, during which Jaime does not speak once. He seems to sense that she needs time to process, and Brienne wonders if every second she remains silent renders her more pathetic-looking in his eyes. She doubts that Cersei ever needed minutes to compose herself after a confession of love. She would simply accept it as her due.

  At last, she says, “I can’t marry a man who’s in love with another woman.”

  “I’m not in love with another woman.”

 “Maybe not in love, but you love her.”

 “For a maid, you seem to know an awful lot about my romantic feelings. You _are_ still a maid?” he adds, his face flickering with something Brienne doesn’t like the look of.

 She ignores the question. “If you _don’t_ love her, it becomes worse that you stayed and served her.”

Jaime rakes his hand through his hair. “Brienne, you can be pitilessly inflexible at times. All our children were dead, my father dead, my mother dead, my brother gone. I clung to what was left. By the end, the only time I could feel anything like what I used to for her was when I watched her sleep. That was the only time she wasn’t prowling about the room with her wine or plotting -I’d say ranting, but she never did rant, it was always madness delivered in a very cold, reasonable voice, just to make you wonder if she might not actually be insane. I felt dread every time she entered the room I was in. Every time she spoke. I’ve come to know that I will never see her again, and I am relieved by that. Is that love, in your eyes? Is that something you covet and feel jealous of?”

Brienne doesn’t answer. Jaime’s words, meant to reassure, have merely conjured for her the image of him lying in bed with Cersei, gazing at her as she sleeps. Then she thinks of the dragonpit again, Jaime placing himself between his sister and that skeleton-creature as he had once stood between Brienne and the bear. The idea of feeling possessive over him never occurs to her -Jaime belonging to Cersei has always seemed as inevitable as the sun rising each day- but she does feel a pang at being taunted with hope of what she cannot have.

“That’s not even my main objection,” she says, determined to put an end to this. “I’ve spent years being independent. I don’t want to be ordered about by a husband.”

Jaime laughs. “You think _I’d_ order _you_ about? You told me to live, so I lived. You told me to keep my promises, so I kept my promises. You told me to let you through the siege line at Riverrun, so I let you through. You told me to come north, so I came north. When have you ever done a single thing that I’ve told you to do? You had me in chains for most of our time together. You _still_ have me in chains. I’m yours.”

   “You say that now, but after a while together… I would be your property and I don’t want to belong to a man.”

   “Renly,” Jaime mutters.

  “I was his guard, not his property.”

 “But you’d have married _him_ if he’d asked. You swore a vow to him when you won’t to me. And that reminds me -what’s been going on between you and the wildling fellow?”

Brienne stares at him and for the first time that evening feels she is looking at the old Jaime. The one who hides genuine feeling under a layer of barbed flippancy. “What wildling fellow?”

“Their _chosen_ _leader_ ,” says Jaime, with scornful emphasis. As if the idea of wildlings being cohesive enough to require and elect a leader is absurd to him.

Brienne has little love for the crude, ginger man whom she too often caught staring at her the way a starved man looks at meat. She does however have a grudging respect for the freefolk who fought to take back Winterfell and defend the Wall while Jaime was still strutting round the Red Keep. She also dislikes Jaime’s tendency to fall back on his birthright, as though being the son of Tywin Lannister makes him intrinsically better than others.

“The freefolk _chose_ him to lead,” she snaps, feeling herself flush at the memory of the huge man scrutinising her from below fiery eyebrows. “Some people might see that as a bigger achievement than simply being born into a powerful house and never having to deserve their position.”

“Some people like you, for example?” Jaime is eying her pink cheeks.

“Perhaps we would have better leaders if we could choose them. Aerys and Joffrey-”

“Were vicious and mad, yes, I know,” he says, bored by the obviousness of her point. “I’m not interested in debating the merits of hereditary succession right now. I’m interested in what you’ve been getting up to with your beloved _chosen leader_.”

“Who have you been talking to, Jaime?” She gets up from her place by the hearth and glowers at him.

“So there’s truth in it then?” He is watching her through narrowed green eyes. “Is that why you wouldn’t answer when I asked if you were still a maid?”

Brienne feels real fury begin to throb through her like a second pulse. “Who have you been talking to?” she repeats.

“The Hound.” He almost shouts it.

 _The Hound._ “And what did he say?” she says through gritted teeth.

“Oh, he was amazed your fellow had made it back here given he was on top of the Wall when it fell. But then he laughed and said it was probably love of you that got him through. I asked what he meant, and he said they’d gone north of the Wall together to catch that wight and the mad fucker wouldn’t shut up about you. I asked what he’d said, and apparently it was a lot of stuff about making babies with you, you waiting for him and what he was going to do to you when he got back here.” He watches her, then adds rather sadistically, “A lot of it centred around your pussy.”

If he had hoped to embarrass her, he fails. Brienne is too angry for that. Her mouth clamps shut and she glares and glares and glares at him.

Eventually, Jaime says rather shamefacedly, “I didn’t really think it was true, but you blushed when I mentioned him and wouldn’t answer when I asked-”

“So now you think it might be true?”

“How would I know? You’ve been away from me a long time. You never tell me anything. Are you…?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. I am not ‘waiting for him’.” Brienne spits the words out.

Jaime’s self-assurance returns instantly. “You ought to tell him then. Tell him the only man you’ll be making babies with is me.”

But Brienne has had enough. Enough of men offering up their dicks to give her children, as though she should be grateful. Enough of men competing to claim the dubious prize of her virginity. Enough of their attempts at wooing her all being laced with some element of aggression or disparagement.

With one swift, angry movement, she has loosened her breeches and shoved them to her ankles. “Go on then,” she says. “Go on. Do it.”

Jaime stands stunned. Brienne’s tunic hangs just low enough to protect her modesty, but the vast stretch of her white legs is visible, and Jaime gawps as though he has never seen legs before.

“No?” she asks. “I thought this was what you wanted. I’m saying _do it_. I won’t resist. I won’t fight you.”

“No,” he says. “Not like this. Gods, Brienne!”

Brienne bends and pulls the breeches back up, gratified. He prides himself on being a man of the world, too experienced to ever be shocked, but she has shocked him now all right. “Because there’s no challenge. You’re no different from any other man, Jaime. You can go now. Go on.”

_Yield, Jaime. Yield. Throw down your sword and leave._

But Jaime has never been very good at knowing when he’s lost.

Afterwards, when he has slipped hurriedly from her room, Brienne will collapse onto her bed in a frenzy of numb shock. She will wonder how on earth what just happened happened.  She had thought she had won. The fight done. Jaime vanquished. But her defences come down just as he aims a last blow, and she makes that stupid, fatal slip.

“Do you love me?” he demands.

“Yes.” It is out before she can stop it, her hand leaping to her traitorous mouth.

He grins, comes toward her and pulls her hand away from her lips. “There you are then.”

“No, Jaime. For all the reasons I’ve just said, I still can’t-“

But he is kissing her and everything sensible is gone. His lips nuzzle at hers. Now they are on her neck. Now her ear. His arms pull her in tighter. She is a weak, hot, trembling mess and she knows that if Jaime told her to strip off all her clothes right now, she would do it. If he told her to jump out of the window, she would probably do it. Gods, this is awful. How does anyone get anything done when there is this?

“We could be happy,” he murmurs into her ear.

“We could be miserable,” she manages, with no sense of its truth anymore.

“But you’re a gambler at heart,” he smiles, then goes rigid and pulls away.

 _Don’t stop._ Brienne nearly say it aloud, but Jaime is pulling something from his pocket. A coin. A silver stag. Brienne’s eyes widen. She starts to protest but Jaime kisses her again, leaving her as dazed as though he’d tipped milk of the poppy down her throat.

“Stag side up, we marry; Robert’s head side up, we don’t,” he says. “Leave it to chance, Brienne, given what idiots _we_ are.”

“All right.” She whispers it because it seems less real that way.

He quickly throws the coin and it lands on his hand. It is stag side up.

“That doesn’t count,” says Brienne. “You cheat. Let me.” She takes the coin, and throws it. It lands and Brienne’s stomach lurches horribly. The stag seems to smirk up at her.

_What have I done? Oh, gods, gods, gods. What have I done?_

Jaime laughs, kisses her hand, and leaves the room very quickly, presumably before Brienne can think of why this one doesn’t count.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Euch, I've really struggled with this chapter and need to get it away from me! Sorry if it's dreadful.
> 
> Jaime's doing that dickhead guy thing of saying "my ex is crazy," but given she actually is, I'm letting him off the hook. The thing about watching Cersei sleep is my way of dealing with the season 7 scene where they wake up together. It seems like that is the only time Jaime feels happy to be with her -when she's spent hours unconscious, not doing or talking crazy shit -because he can kid himself she's someone other than who she is. As soon as she leaves the bed, he's back to looking horrified.


	7. Chapter 7

Jaime amuses himself on the way back to his room by imagining the reactions he will get when he announces he is marrying Brienne. Bronn probably won’t be surprised. The Stark girls will be appalled. Losing their precious Brienne to a shit like him. Tyrion will simply think him irredeemable. To have Jaime’s looks and Jaime’s charisma and to have escaped Cersei only to devote himself once again to monogamy. Monogamy with a woman so pig-headed she would make a block of granite look pliable. But no, Brienne is more iron than granite. Strong and tough, but get her hot and bothered and she bends quickly enough. What would Lady Catelyn think if she had lived? Had it occurred to her even for a second as she sent them off down that river that this could be the result? No. She had seen Brienne’s looks and Jaime’s wickedness and that had been that. What would his father have made of Brienne? Jaime chuckles to himself. Very little. He’d have looked at her face to ascertain age, then at her wide hips, and then, satisfied that she would spend the next fifteen years acting as soil for Jaime’s seed, would have focussed on more interesting soil -Tarth and the alliances and profit that could be harvested from it.

Though of course, in his exhilaration, Jaime is forgetting the army of the dead, led by a greenseer on a dragon. Right now he could probably marry Tyrion and no one would bat an eyelid.

Jaime opens the door of the room he shares with Bronn, and the smile twists on his lips as he sees Tyrion lying on his mattress, half-covered by furs. Is this some kind of cosmic payback for being too irreverent? He mentally jokes about marrying his brother after years of fucking his sister, and lo and behold, here his brother is, waiting for him in his bed.

On the other mattress, Bronn sits, sharpening a dagger made of dragonglass. The atmosphere is tense and Jaime looks between the pair.

“Brother?” he says.

“Jaime. Sit down.”

“Why?” Jaime remains standing, knowing Tyrion is less comfortable when their height difference is this apparent. Looking at Tyrion’s expression, he wants that advantage right now.

“Why?” says Tyrion, tugging at his beard in agitation. “Why am I telling you to sit down? Because that’s what people say before they deliver bad news. I don’t know if your legs will give way or not, but I wanted to warn you that what I’m about to say is going to hurt you.”

On the other bed, Bronn has swapped the brittle obsidian dagger he had held for his sword. The rhythmic stroke of the blade on the whetstone chills Jaime to his marrow. In it he hears the marching of armies, the flap of dragon’s wings, and the heartbeat of the sword, as though it lives. Bronn eyes him warily and Jaime sees that he is ready. You don’t fight alongside a man as much as he and Bronn have without recognising the way a man’s body changes when it is gearing up for fight.

“Tell me.”

Tyrion takes a deep breath. “Cersei has died.”

The sound of the blade on the whetstone stops. The crackling, rushing sound of the fire in the grate stops too, although that cannot be right, because Jaime can still see the flames dancing there like dying leaves. He can hear nothing but his own breathing, slow and even. It echoes in his ears. Is that the blood leaving his head? He might fall. He sits before that can happen. On the cold flags.

At last he finds words. “She can’t have.”

“She has,” says Tyrion gently.

“No, I would know,” says Jaime. “I would feel it if she had-”

Tyrion hands him a letter. “This came days ago.”

Jaime takes it, but when he tries to read it, the letters seem to move and twist and the lines won’t stay still. “What does it say?”

“The Lannister army is on its way. They won’t get up here in time to help us, of course,” Tyrion gives a bitter laugh, “but they will be in the Riverlands soon enough, if our forces don’t manage to…”

“That’s her signature,” Jaime says. “She was alive enough when she wrote this! She must have come to her senses after I left.”

“She didn’t come to her senses. She didn’t see the error of her ways when you walked out. She didn’t decide to behave decently. It’s a forgery of her signature.”

“I don’t understand,” says Jaime angrily, as Tyrion’s fists twist in his lap. “For pity’s sake, Tyrion, spit out why you think she’s-” But he cannot say the word.

Tyrion’s whole face is screwed up, as though he is holding a lemon, or a turd, on his tongue. He has already told Jaime that Cersei has died. What could possibly be worse than that that he won’t simply say it?

It is Bronn who steps in. Bronn who can no longer stand the tension. “The younger Stark girl ended her. It was arranged after you arrived here without the army. That Faceless Man stuff we heard in the taverns on the way up here is true.”

Jaime cannot take it in. None of it makes any sense. He had enjoyed the myth of Arya Stark. The wild girl who came back to avenge her family by slaughtering an entire house. It was as dramatic as any gesture could be. It was impressive. It had hurt no one Jaime cared for and thus he was free to be entertained by it. He had not once seen the girl since his arrival at Winterfell, and that rendered her even more a legend. A shadow. A being that hovered between dream and reality. Certainly not someone corporeal enough to end the real, flesh and blood being of Cersei. In his confusion, he seizes the one thing he can understand. “It’s Faceless _Men_ … Arya Stark’s not a man.”

“Aye, she’s not a man,” says Bronn wearily, “but wearing your sister’s face, she’s the queen, free to command the Lannister troops to march north and support us, and to send the Golden Company as well, when they arrive.”

Jaime starts to laugh. “This is a joke,” he says, looking between Bronn and his brother. “You had me worried when you said she’d died. Now you say Arya Stark travelled to King’s Landing, murdered Cersei, sliced off her face, and is now wearing it, ruling as queen, and sending the troops up here?”

“Yes,” says Tyrion. Jaime can see no gleam of amusement in his eye. No twitch of his lips. No sign that his brother is joking.

“All right, I’ll play,” he says. Perhaps this is a test -to see how much he still cares for their sister, to see if he is trustworthy. Perhaps it is a dream. Or perhaps Tyrion’s huge, busy brain has finally broken under the weight of all its knowledge and plotting, and this is how he accounts for Cersei’s letter in which she is truly offering help. Maybe as Cersei is rediscovering her sanity, Tyrion is losing his. “How did Arya Stark get to King’s Landing so fast then? You say she set off after I arrived, so even if she’d sailed, she couldn’t be there yet. You expect me to believe that she not only got there and murdered Cersei and took her face, but that the troops have gathered their provisions for the train -which takes days- and that they are already well on their way to the Riverlands. The girl would have had to arrive in King’s Landing within a day or two for all that to have happened. Do the Faceless Men teach people how to vanish and appear across continents as well as how to steal faces?”

“No,” says Tyrion quietly. “Daenerys took her on Drogon the day after you arrived. It’s only a few hours’ flight. They landed in darkness that night, not far from the city.”

Jaime stares at him, trying to read him. To understand why he is saying these things. “This gets more fantastical by the second. So Daenerys and her dragon are involved too?”

“Yes. Westeros needed to be united against this threat, and while Cersei wasn’t beloved by any stretch of the imagination, she was a stable-” Tyrion manages a small laugh here. “Well, she was a _longstanding_ member of the royal family. Openly overthrowing the last Baratheon would have led to political turmoil that we can’t deal with now. This was the solution.”

“It’s true, Jaime.” Bronn again. “That day in the training yard when I was wondering where the dragon had gone, remember? No, don’t look at me like that, I didn’t know about this then!” he hurriedly adds. “I found out about ten minutes ago.”

Jaime feels as though he has been wandering about in a mist, unable to see a thing. Now he is emerging, and the world is becoming visible again, but he cannot bear to see it. He wants to return to the haze.

“No,” he says. “No. I would know.” He holds his stump up. “I felt this and this was just a hand. You think the other half of me could be ripped away and I wouldn’t feel it, know it somehow?”

“You lost her a long time ago,” says Tyrion. “I know it’s romantic to think you were one soul trapped in two bodies, that you entered the world together so would leave it together, and all the other shit she told you to keep you obedient, but the fact is you were two very different people.”

“You told me she had died,” says Jaime, eyes blazing.

“Yes,” says Tyrion.

“That she _died_ ,” repeats Jaime. “You made it sound like she got ill or fell or something. Like it was something _she_ did. ‘She died’ is very different to ‘she was slaughtered and had her beautiful face sliced off’, isn’t it?”

“I was trying to be kind,” says Tyrion. “I was trying to make it less-“

“Brutal?”

“Yes.”

“I bet you were. Because you were part of this. You killed our mother, you killed our father and you saw your chance to kill our sister too. And a chance to disfigure her because you always resented her beauty. Our beauty.”

“I had no say in this,” roars Tyrion, finally losing his temper. “We tried to settle this peacefully and Cersei mistook diplomacy for weakness. Arya Stark has wanted her revenge since Cersei ordered the death of that direwolf on the Kingsroad.  I can’t imagine the imprisonment and beheading of Ned Stark did much to _soften the girl’s heart_ towards our precious sister.”

Jaime begins to speak, but Tyrion thunders over him.

“And that’s without considering what Sansa suffered at her and Joffrey’s hands. You think that predisposed the Starks to be merciful? You know, Arya Stark sent two letters. Jon and Daenerys got eight words to say mission accomplished. Sansa got a long letter which Varys later purloined and passed to me. There was a description of how she’d done it -she obviously knew Sansa would want to imagine it -and then something else. She said after meeting with the commanders of the army, she went to the cells in the Red Keep. She found the body of a septa in one. A woman of the Faith Militant, quite recently dead. I can’t actually bring myself to say the things that had been done to that woman. It was bad enough to read it, but suffice to say, the Mountain visited that cell daily for a year on Cersei’s orders. The torture that woman endured makes what the Mountain did to Elia Martell and her babes look like mercy. It makes what he did to Oberyn look like a bedtime cuddle.”

Jaime cannot speak.

“You must have known,” Tyrion continues, “that she threw away her chance to live when she went back on the pact. I’m sure you didn’t let yourself think of it but you must have known deep down.”

“You knew she was carrying my child.” Jaime almost chokes on the words. “I assumed she would be shown mercy, at least until the baby was born.”

“That’s what she assumed too,” says Tyrion. “Jaime, she wasn’t with child. She told you that to keep you loyal, and she told me because she knew the guilt I felt over Myrcella and that I would want to save this babe to make amends. She thought I would persuade Daenerys to hold off until it was born, and by that time she’d have gathered her forces while ours would be decimated.”

Jaime suddenly finds he can move. He lurches to his feet, and Bronn and Tyrion spring to theirs too, braced for attack.

“I need to get out,” he says.

“Out of where?”

“This room. This place.”

Bronn and Tyrion exchange a glance. “We’ll come with you.”

“No!” He checks himself, tries to seem reasonable. Sane. He fails. “Look, I’m not going on a rampage. I’m not going to kill anyone -yet. I need to be alone. Get out of my way.”

Bronn moves uncertainly away from the door and Jaime leaves. His hand seizes a torch from a bracket on the wall and his feet stumble down the passage, down two flights of stairs and out into the snow-covered courtyard and moonlit night. He considers the godswood but it is irretrievably associated with innocence now. Brienne in that pool, as naked and uncorrupted as though she had just been born. Ned Stark, praying to his trees. Jaime does not want innocence now. He wants his sister. He wants to be sharing a cruel joke with her. Comforting her. Killing for her. Swimming with her. Holding her hand as she labours. Cersei, Cersei, Cersei.

Across the yard, he can see the lightning-struck watchtower. He wants to be up there again, breaking vows with her in that crumbling room where the ivy runs riots across walls and floor. The place where everything started to go wrong. Jaime’s eyes run up the length of the tower, and suddenly his heart goes cold. His breath catches in his throat. The Stark boy is there. That child, Bran. He moves up the wall like some huge spider, his hands and feet finding ledges and holds where there should be none. Jaime squeezes his eyes shut. _No. You’re imagining it. It’s not real. You’re seeing things._ But when he opens them again, the boy is still there on the wall. His hair is longer and floppy, as it had been the day Jaime pushed him. Jaime watches the boy for several seconds, the hairs prickling on the back of his neck. Then the moon is submerged under a wave of cloud and when it floats up again, the boy is gone. _You imagined it._ But he knows he didn’t.

Jaime had thought he could not bear to be within these walls anymore. He had been heading for the north gate which now stands open for the men who troop back and forth, rolling barrels of tar along to the stockades that are still being built out there. He had wanted to be in the snowy wilderness, miles north of Winterfell. Perhaps just to walk. Perhaps to clear his head. Perhaps to meet the dead on his own terms.

 _You can still go_ , he tells himself. _Leave while you still can._ He can hear the shouts of the men out there, can just about make out through the gateway that blurred line where horizon meets sky. _Just walk out. No one will stop you._ But then his eyes are drawn back to the tower, and he feels resigned and at the same time unutterably sad. The option of losing himself in a blizzard of grief far away -that was the dream. The tower -that room and that window where he committed his worst, his most unforgiveable crime -that is the reality. Now is his time to pay.

Feeling a dread that goes beyond any he has ever experienced, Jaime moves towards the tower. No one sees him go and his feet leave no prints on the impacted snow. _I’m like a ghost. It’s like I’m already dead._ The wind has blown millions of flakes through the cracked archway so that he is up to his waist in the drifts before he can get to the stone steps. They spiral up, and Jaime remembers that day years ago, taking them two at a time, hoping his sister would have got there before him. She hadn’t of course; Jaime was always the one who waited. It had been daytime then, and the northern climate tropical compared to this chill.

There is no rushing today. His one hand holds the torch. The tower is missing its top third and some snow has found its way down the staircase and frozen, but Jaime’s slowness cannot entirely be attributed to fear of slipping on the patches of gleam. Has he known for some time that he must climb these steps once more? None of this feels a surprise to him. It is as though he has dreamt it many times only to forget it with each sunrise. Up and up, inside the rotting walls.

 _Their room_ , when he finally reaches it, is even more dilapidated than on that day. The room where it happened. More snow drifts. Ice. Jaime’s golden torchlight meets the silver moonlight and casts an eerie beauty over everything. The ruined walls. The snow-smothered ivy. The decomposing beams. A dead crow with its eyes pecked out. Jaime himself, with his greying hair and ugly stump. Everything is this room is broken or decaying.

Everything except the boy. Bran Stark wanders slowly about the room, his hand occasionally pushing against the walls as though testing their strength. He is not the little child Jaime saw climbing the wall moments earlier. He is the young man. Short hair. Gaunt face. His eyes no longer milky white. His body no longer ruined, though Jaime notices with a pang that he avoids the window where it happened.

Jaime lowers his torch and waits for the boy to speak.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The dragon speed I've gone with for Drogon is an estimate based on the fact that Daemon and Rhaenyra apparently used to race their dragons, Syrax and Caraxes, from King's Landing to Dragonstone and back, every day. This is approximately a 700-mile round trip and they did it for fun. If a dragon can do about 250 miles an hour, that's just under three hours of racing a day. I think any longer than that and it would cease to be fun. So yeah, they're fast.


	8. Chapter 8

“He will be a cripple. Worse than a cripple. Give me a good clean death.” Bran brings Jaime’s own words back to haunt him as he eyes Jaime’s stump. “That’s what you said, isn’t it? You changed your mind when it happened to you.”

“Yes.” Jaime wants to apologise but he was never any good at humbling himself, and the fact that the boy is wandering about the room, agile as ever, makes it hard to apologise for crippling him. It is even more difficult to explain that he was trying to protect his lover and children. _All four of them are dead anyway. What kind of protector does that make me?_

 “There are things you need to do.” Bran’s voice is low and calm, the power has shifted since the last time they were up here. He does not need to say _you owe me_. That sense of obligation and reparation hangs heavy in the air.

“How is it that you can walk?”

“I can’t really,” says Bran. “You’re seeing a manifestation of me. My body is still in my chair.”

“Can others see you?”

Bran frowns. “The Night King can. Some people seem able to hear me sometimes -my father heard me call to him once. Your brother heard me very recently. So far you are the only man to see me.”

“Why? Why can I see you when others can’t?”

“Because you did this to me. You created a bond between us that day when you pushed me.”

Jaime stares at him, stunned.

Bran continues to scrutinise him. “Trauma unlocks this kind of power. I started to see things and to warg after you pushed me. My sister Arya started to warg after she went blind. Jojen Reed, who came north with me, started having visions after an illness. And that’s the other reason you can see me now: _you’re_ in pain because of your sister’s death, and pain leaves you open to this kind of thing.”

Jaime thinks back to Tyrion sitting on his bed, holding that letter and struggling to get his words out. _Why did he tell me now? He must have known he risked losing my allegiance and that he gained nothing by telling me._ Jaime looks at Bran. “You made him tell me,” he says quietly. “You made him tell me of Cersei, didn’t you? So I would suffer, so you could break through to me.”

“I whispered a few times that he should tell you,” says Bran. “He’d drunk far too much, as usual, and assumed it was his conscience talking.”

“Why?” asks Jaime. He knows he has no right to be angry, but he is. He feels like he and Tyrion are mere puppets, with Bran Stark pulling the strings.

“Because I needed you to see me this way, not in my body,” says Bran. “There are things you must do and this will make it easier.”

Jaime takes a deep breath and gives up the anger. There is so little left of the human in Bran Stark. “What must I do?”

“The red woman who served Stannis Baratheon is one or two day’s ride from here. We need her, but Jon threatened her with execution if she ever returned to Winterfell. She has no horse. You must go and fetch her.”

Jaime frowns. “Won’t they execute her if I bring her here?”

“No, but don’t tell anyone where you’re going.”

“Why do you need her?”

“She serves the Lord of Light. He gives her power.”

“And,” says Jaime, with trepidation, “will the Lord of Light help us?” Jaime has precious little faith in the gods.

“In a way,” says Bran.

“In a way?”

“He gave Beric Dondarrion visions in the flames that sent him and Thoros north. He gave the Hound a vision to tell them where they must go -a mountain that looked like an arrowhead. Through his priests, he resurrected Jon and Beric from the dead. Without those things, no one would have gone to catch a wight, Daenerys Targaryen would never have flown her dragons north, and the Wall would still stand.”

Jaime might never have been a religious man, but the horror of what Bran has just said chills him. He has a sudden sense of horrifically evil forces at work. Of he and his fellow men being mere pieces to be moved about in a game of carnage. “If what you say is true… this red god wants us all dead. He wants the end of the world.”

“Not the end of the world,” says Bran. “He wants violence and terror and suffering. He is a god of war. His followers burn people alive for his amusement. He’s not much different from the folk who gather in the fighting pits of Meereen to watch men hack each other to bits. Not so different to the crowds who cheered as my father lost his head or as Lady Brienne fought that bear, or the ones threw shit as your sister did her walk of atonement. Not so different to you, and all the other men who never felt so alive as when they were killing other men.”

Jaime flinches. He thinks back to the day he fought Brienne after months in his cell. The last time he fought with his right hand. He had brought her within an inch of death a hundred times or more, his sword slicing close to her flesh. He had been drunk on it.

Bran continues, “Me as well. I used to enjoy stories of the Long Night and the carnage -because who wants to hear a story where everyone is happy and everything is right? We thrive on the suffering of others.”

Jaime stares at the snow-speckled ivy at his boots. At last, he says, “Why do you want the red woman then? Won’t she won’t just bring more violence and death for her god’s entertainment?”

“There’ll be a vast amount of death,” Bran admits, “but she will help us win.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve seen it. And because if the Night King wins here, he will have three dragons and an army even bigger than he has now. He’ll be unstoppable. Within a few years, every human in the world will be a walking, rotting corpse, united under his rule. No more wars. No more executions, torture, murder, rape. No more ritual burnings.”

“You’re saying,” says Jaime, trying to keep his voice level, “that the Lord of Light wants men to survive because that’s the only way to keep the violence going?”

“Yes,” says Bran phlegmatically. “No other animal has our propensity for mass killing, nor our desire for power and revenge. Humans are mostly either vicious brutes or frightened mice, too meek to stop the vicious brutes. We might not have the god we want, but we have the god we deserve.”

“Not all of us,” says Jaime, and he finds his voice choking. “Some people are good and brave enough to fight for what is right no matter how hurt they get in the process. They deserve better than this.”

“Yes, some of us,” says Bran. “Jon fights for good though he hates killing. My father too. And your lady -her master of arms made her slaughter piglets and lambs to toughen her up; she cried for them for days. Killing doesn’t come naturally to her. You’ll want to take her with you though. She still has her swordhand and she knows the place where the red woman is. She sheltered there once with Podrick. Tell her it’s the ruins where she found the vixen and her three cubs. I know she hates the red woman for what happened to Renly, but she’ll do the right thing.”

Jaime considers playing dumb, pretending not to know what Bran means by calling Brienne _his lady_ , but the boy’s bored expression stops him. Jaime cannot abide the thought of being boring and predictable, but Bran Stark knows everything. He has probably already seen this conversation play out several times, and while Jaime cannot avoid being predictable, he can at least not drag out an interaction that is clearly tedious to the boy by being coy regarding Brienne.

Instead he says, “Will she survive? Will she still be alive after this war?”

The boy looks him full in the eye. “Yes.”

Jaime does not know whether to believe him. He probably knows that if he says no, Jaime will forgo the mission and take Brienne away and never come back. Hide her away somewhere where the red god can no longer use them in his game.

“One more thing,” says Jaime, “You said you needed me to see you this way rather than in your body -because it would _make it easier_.”

“Yes.”

“What did you mean? Make what easier?”

 

 -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -

 

She is standing in the empty hall of Evenfall, listening to the tapping sound. It is like branches on a window pane, or meat being tenderized down in the kitchen, or a smithy hammering at armour some way off. It makes no sense, Brienne thinks, because there is no longer any breeze to move the trees, no cook to pound the meat, and no smithy in the forge. Everyone is gone from Evenhall, even the weather. The hall stands in perpetual gloom, untouched by sun, rain, snow or wind. Only Galladon remains, and he while he rasps and rattles, he does not tap about like this. What can it be?

“Brienne, open the damn door.”

She sits up with a gasp. Only the glow from one candle prevents the room from being dungeon-black. It is still night.

“Brienne!” The hiss comes again.

Brienne, still jumpy from her dream, is a blur of white as she grabs sword and dagger and whips from bed to door.

“Who is it?” she whispers, half-braced for her dead brother to burst in. The dreams seem to be getting more vivid.

“Jaime,” comes the indignant but muffled response. “Let me in.”

She does, utterly disorientated. On an unconscious level, she has registered that his attempts to be quiet, and the silence in the rest of the castle means he is not here to tell her the dead have arrived.

“Get dressed,” he barks. “Put your armour on. We need to leave.”

“Leave Tarth?” she says, groggily. “Or just Evenfall?”

“What? No, Brienne, we’re not on Tarth. We have to leave Winterfell now.”

She shakes her head, trying to understand, and remembers that she agreed to marry him mere hours ago. “Run away to marry? Like Lyanna and Rhaegar?”

Jaime smiles wearily. “If only. Just trust my judgement this one time. Put your clothes on and I’ll explain later.”

Wordlessly, Brienne begins to dress while Jaime gathers a few spare garments and wraps them up in her furs, placing them beside a sack of his own. She spurns his attempt to help put on her armour, and at last takes up Oathkeeper, blows out the candle and they leave the room. As though still in a dream, Brienne follows Jaime down the passages and stairways and across the yard to the stables. He saddles two horses and hands her the reigns, before taking up two empty barrels and stuffing the bundle of furs and the sack inside them.

“There are still men building the stockades outside,” he says. “The guards will trust you so you take the horses. I doubt they’ll dare ask you, but if they do, say they’re needed to move more wood. Take them west along the wall, away from the men, and wait for me at the corner. I wouldn’t put it past my brother to have the guards watching out for me, so I’m going to blend in and roll out these barrels with the other men who are taking out the barrels of tar. As soon as I get the chance, I’ll double back to you with the provisions.”

He pulls a hat down over his brows, and Brienne notices he has pinned his cloak so that it covers the lion engraved on his armour. His golden hand is concealed beneath a black glove. She nods blearily and sets off with the horses.

As Jaime had suspected, the guards give her no trouble. As the Lady of Winterfell’s trusted advisor, she could probably walk out with fifty horses and they would ask no questions. Under the reviving power of the glacial wind, Brienne begins to wonders why Tyrion might have asked the guards to watch out for his older brother, and a familiar surge of irritation rises. _What has he done this time?_

She leads the horses along the wall, hearing as the sounds of the men calling to one another grows fainter and fainter. The moon is bright, but next to the wall she is in shadow, and the horses are dark. No one sees her. When she reaches the corner, she mounts a horse and waits.

Jaime joins her within minutes, his breath steaming. He hands Brienne her bundle and secures his own to his horse before climbing up.

“Where are we going?”

“To the ruins where you and Podrick saw a vixen and three cubs.” He smiles at her stunned face.

 _How does he know about that?_ Brienne pushes away her surprise. None of what is happening makes any sense. She just has to trust. “That’s two or three days’ ride in this snow.”

“Apparently Bran Stark’s more of an optimist than you. He said one or two.”

“ _He_ told you we need to leave? Has he woken then? Why is he sending us there?”

“I’ll explain later. Come on, which way?”

Brienne forces herself to ignore the creeping feeling of violation at the thought of Bran Stark watching moments of her life and revealing them to Jaime, and to focus instead on practicalities. The place they are headed to is a burnt-out farm, south west of here. The route she and Pod took last time will be impassable now that the snow has come. Nor will it afford them shelter sufficient to stop them freezing to death, for they had taken the rocky paths across windswept higher ground, avoiding villages, inns and woodland.

“We have to take a different route,” says Brienne, and she turns her horse south and kicks it into life.


	9. Chapter 9

They ride for hours across the crisp, white wilderness, their journey lit by moon and stars. Jaime does not utter a word to her in that time, and while Brienne does not push him, she soon begins to question her own wisdom in following him out here on mere faith. He can be so reckless and his behaviour over the last few days regarding her has been particularly unhinged.

 _Bran Stark sent us. You’re doing this for Lady Catelyn’s son_. She tells herself this, but it still feels insane to be riding out in these conditions. _We’ll be lucky if we don’t lose both horses and freeze to death._

She remembers the last time they travelled alone together. She remembers the pink dress and tourney sword. The sounds of the bear’s claws ripping through her flesh. She had believed the last sounds she would hear would be the bear beginning to devour her, and the laughter of the watching men. She had been so sure death was coming, and instead Jaime had. Landing on the sand and shielding her body with his. She had never expected her life to contain a moment like that. A moment that, no matter how many times she recalled it, stunned her. She kept thinking back over it, expecting it to change. Expecting that, rather than _choosing_ to save her or die beside her, Jaime had been recaptured and thrown in. Or that he had simply been there all along, and that when the bear had come charging, he had fled, leaving her prone on the sand. But no. Time and time again, Jaime jumps down and covers her body as the bear comes rushing. It will never make sense.

Towards sunrise, the wind picks up and mountains of cloud blow in from the north. The snow falls so thick and fast that they can no longer see more than a few yards in front of them, and the horses become distressed. They dismount beside a ring of oak trees and Brienne finds a space behind a tangle of thornbushes and under one of the bigger trees. This hollow is sheltered from the worst of the wind and snow, and she pulls blankets over the two horses and ties them to a branch. When she turns, Jaime is clumsily attempting to create a makeshift tent by propping up a great canvas sheet on two sticks that he has rammed deep into the snow. Such a construction will not withstand this wind, and Brienne gently pushes him away, securing the sheet herself, and folding part of the canvas along the ground so they do not have to sit on the snow. They crawl in and listen to the howling wind outside.

He is inches from her but, encased in metal and without a word or look for her in hours, she can almost believe she is looking at a statue of him. His armour robs him of the warm flesh and blood quality that made him so dangerous, so irresistible last night. She feels safe to study him. The side of his face. That beautiful hollow below his cheekbone. The stubble. The pinpricks of pores along his nose. The eyelashes that are longer and prettier than any girl’s. It is a purely cerebral act, she tells herself. She is simply appreciating a work of art. She is not falling deeper in love. She _isn’t_.

 “Tell me what’s wrong,” she says.

“Oh.” He starts as though remembering that she is there. “Cersei is- gone.”

“Gone?” says Brienne.  “She left her throne?” Cersei had not seemed the type to leave her possessions about for others to take. Brienne still cringes when she thinks of her baleful stare at the dragonpit.

“Dead,” says Jaime cautiously, as though trying out a strange new food. “She’s… dead.”

“Jaime. Oh, Jaime.”

“Arya Stark killed her the night after I got to Winterfell. I found out last night.”

Brienne does not know how to console him. She has little experience of comforting or being comforted, though she vaguely remembers a servant bringing her a cup of sweet warm milk once, and Septa Roelle telling her that snot and tears made her look dirty and the most Brienne could hope for was to look clean. Awkwardly, she pats his metal shoulder, which produces a dull clunking sound but certainly not warmth or reassurance.

“How do you feel?” she asks him, before cursing herself for the inane question. _Stupid, slow woman, always saying the wrong thing._

Jaime shakes his head. “Everything. Horrified her life ended brutally. Relieved she’s out of her misery and can hurt no one else. Angry that they did it, but calm because what else could they do? Shocked that she’s gone, forever. And at the same time, at peace -as though she’s been dead years and I’ve already grieved. Which, in a way, I have.”

Brienne’s eyes fill with tears for him.

“Sometimes,” he says in a voice hard and cold as his armour, “I wanted her to die. In the last year. I imagined her, eating a good dinner, drinking a flagon of wine and then going to her bed and just -never waking up. Perhaps even being with her children on the other side -Joffrey and Myrcella, anyway. Sometimes, I even pictured myself slipping the poison I gave to Olenna Tyrell into her wine, as an act of kindness.”

Brienne feels her stomach lurch at this. She feels as though she has stumbled on something perverted and twisted beyond all recognition of what it should be. She thinks of her father, of her brother, of Renly. Of Jaime. She could never imagine wanting them dead, would have died to keep any of them safe. Jaime watches her, and Brienne has a sudden memory of seeing water the exact shade of green of his eyes. There were a couple of tiny craggy islands miles south of Tarth. When you sailed into the murky water around them you knew to be careful; that green meant jagged rocks below the surface. Rocks that could scupper you if you weren’t careful. It occurs to Brienne that while she loves deeply, Jaime is more about loving madly.

“Forgive me, you shouldn’t have had to hear that,” Jaime says. He seems to be waiting for her to protest that she should, that she wants honesty no matter how unpleasant, but she doesn’t argue, and his face hardens again. It surprises her when, a few seconds later, he has leaned in and is kissing her fiercely. She gasps which seems to spur him on, and he is pushing against her, his armour clanging against hers, the sound jangling on her nerves. His hand is on her chin and then the back of her head, holding her tightly, as his tongue presses into her mouth. The difference between the previous kisses he pressed upon her and this thing he is doing now is as immense as the difference between getting caught in a summer rain shower, and battling with the sea currents at Peak Rock.

Brienne pulls herself from his grasp and retreats the few inches that the tent allows. She had pushed Owen Inchfield onto a campfire for doing less than Jaime has just done. Her lips are wet from his but she is too embarrassed to lift her hand and wipe them.

“Why have we come out here?” she asks him, trying to sound business-like.

Jaime gives her a narrow-eyed look, then takes his bag and hands her bread and a slab of goat’s cheese wrapped in leaves. Brienne breaks off half the bread and uses her dirk to cut the cheese.

“The three-eyed raven opened his big, mysterious beak last night. Said we need to bring Stannis Baratheon’s red priestess back to Winterfell to help.”

It is a good job Brienne has not yet bitten into her food or she might have choked. “What? The red woman? You brought _me_ as an escort for the woman who helped to murder Renly?”

“You’ll just have to put your distaste aside, I’m afraid.”

“Distaste?” Brienne snaps. “She helped slay the one man apart from my father who ever-”

“Yes?” says Jaime tightly. “Carry on.”

“She burnt a little girl to death.” The horror of those words brings tears to Brienne’s eyes. They don’t feel like the kind of words that should ever be spoken aloud.

Jaime turns away. “I know. I know that.”

“What kind of help will such a woman offer? Will she give birth to an army of shadows and send them into battle? Or build a bonfire of all the children?”

“Perhaps a bonfire of the Starks’ furniture. I swear it’s got more hideous since I was last here,” says Jaime.

“Don’t be flippant.” Which, of course, is like asking the sea not to be wet.

“I’m in earnest. Winterfell’s the only place I know where the passage of eight years brings more liver spots, wrinkles and general decrepitude to the furniture than the people. My wardrobe stoops like its spent seventy years working the land. It even smells like an octogenarian’s feet.”

Brienne bristles. “I doubt the Starks care whether you approve of their furniture. I care that you tricked me out here though.”

Jaime huffs with irritation. “She isn’t going to burn anyone, Brienne.”

“How do you know?”

“The boy told me. Or should I say the bird told me?”

“Then what? I need to know what I’m helping to bring about by fetching her.”

Jaime leans forward and lifts a flap of canvas, but the flakes that swirl in confirm the blizzard is still going strong.

“She raised Jon Snow from the dead, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” says Brienne. “So she’s going to run around the battlefield doing her little rituals, is she? Cutting the corpses’ hair and saying magic words to resurrect them before the Night King can?”

“Oh, she’s a barber as well?” says Jaime, tugging at his own overgrown locks. “You seemed to prefer me with short hair. Does she only groom corpses, or will she do the living too?”

“That soon won’t matter if you keep refusing to answer my question,” Brienne tells him.

“Brienne!” he says. “No wonder your other betrothals fell through when you’re so free with the death threats. Luckily, I’m not so craven as other men.”

This time Brienne cannot respond. The usual red stain of humiliation does not creep to her cheeks. It is almost as though her blood has taken pity on her, has decided her embarrassment is indeed complete without it turning her face into a furnace too. How does he know? Did Bran tell him that too? Does he know about Ronnet Connington and his rose?

“Forgive me,” says Jaime, trying to take her hand. “I was only teasing. In my family, tender feelings weren’t permitted. I sometimes forget that you’re -not so hardened.

“I _am_ hardened,” says Brienne, fists so tight that her nails cut crescents into her palms. She has half a mind to bop him on the nose, show him how hardened she really is. “Tell me what the red woman is going to do.”

“Apparently,” he says, “she’s going to raise Bran from the dead.”

Brienne glowers at him. “Bran isn’t dead!”

“Not yet. Brienne, just listen. This Night King is a man who had dragonglass pushed into his heart. He’s both dead and alive. That’s how he controls both the living and the dead. His wights are corpses that he wargs into. His commanders are the living that he warged into when they were just babies.”

“ _Babies_?”

“Wildling baby boys. Bran said that even powerful wargs can’t warg into other humans without causing huge damage. Bran accidentally did it to a stableboy and broke the boy’s mind. Apparently a warg called Varamyr Sixskins was dying, and to avoid death, he tried to warg into the body of a woman. She went mad. Bit out her tongue and clawed her eyes out. He had to abandon the attempt and go into a wolf instead. The point is, humans have too much sense of self to simply let another person enter their mind and take over their body.”

Brienne feels slightly sick.

She is imagining Cersei and Jaime as babies, of Cersei’s way of getting into Jaime’s head and controlling and shaping him. She pushes the thought away. “That’s why he warged into babes? Because they don’t know who they are yet? They have no way of fighting another consciousness taking them over?”

“Yes.”

“So what does it mean?” she asks.

“The boy said at the moment he can only warg into living animals. If he’s to be a match for the Night King, he must be both dead and alive too. He has to die and be brought back. That way he can warg into corpses as well, and prevent our army from shrinking as the Night King’s swells. It would mean if our two dragons fall, they can be resurrected on our side rather than the other.”

“So she won’t help us avoid war,” says Brienne, flatly. “There must still be fighting and death.”

“Always, while humans are what they are.”

Brienne does not ask how the boy will die. She has enough grotesque images of killings in her head without adding more from sheer curiosity.

“You’re going to sleep now,” she tells him, when they have eaten the bread and cheese. “You didn’t get any last night.”

“No,” he begins, but she cuts across him fiercely.

“Then good luck finding those ruins on your own. I won’t mount my horse until you’ve slept.”

He glares, and she thinks she hears the words “bloody” and “pigheaded” and “stubborn” and “wench” as he crashes down, still wearing his armour. The words are less insult and more an attempt to assert his autonomy even as he obeys her.

Brienne spends the next ten minutes listening as he alternates between mutinous silence and then grumbling about why he can’t sleep -it is too cold, his armour is uncomfortable, he is too shocked, the wind is so loud, the canvas is flapping, he can never sleep straight after eating. On and on until Brienne, exhausted herself, is tempted to smother him. Finally though, he begins to snore, and she finds her own eyes closing too. She has a brief thought that she really ought to stay awake and keep watch, but then she is lost.

  * -      -     -



Jaime wakes two or three hours later when Brienne knocks the tent down on him as she tries to crawl out. Her shoulder dislodges the stick and Jaime wakes and has to lift the canvas off his face before he can sit up. His view of Brienne’s bottom and thighs is not a good one -the woman, as always, is bound up in armour and chainmail and too many clothes -but lack of imagination has never been one of Jaime’s failings, and he finds his cock swelling.

 “Go back to sleep,” Brienne hisses at him, as though the canvas coming down is his fault. She deftly reinstates the tent, and then is gone, out into the snow.

Without her there to distract him, Jaime is acutely aware of how frozen he is. It is that dreadful, bone-deep cold that prevents you from doing anything to better your situation for fear of becoming even colder. Jaime knows he needs to get up and get moving but the thought of stepping outside the tent and facing that chill is too grim. Then, unbidden, comes the image of that ginger, bearded, wildling twat. Tormund Giantsbane. What a fucking stupid name. No doubt Tormund Giantsbane, who has spent his entire life plodding through snow and breaking ice for his monthly ablutions and the catching of seals, would not be shivering in this tent if he were here now. He’d be, in Bronn’s words, _getting shit done_.

After the Hound had told him what the wildling had said about Brienne, Jaime had watched the fellow like a hawk. Brienne had still been out in the woods, chopping down trees, when the Eastwatch survivors had arrived. Tormund Giantsbane had apparently watched many of his friends fall to their deaths when the wall came down, and had spent the next few weeks trekking through ice and blizzards with the other survivors to get to Winterfell, yet he didn’t seem to have lost even a toe to frostbite, and seemingly had no desire to rest in front of a fire or lie down in a soft bed. No. He had spent a few minutes glowering as a maester checked him over. Then, gnawing on a bone, he had come straight to the training yard and begun sparring, bone still in his left hand. He’d knocked half a dozen northmen into the snow, before retreating, head tipped back and eyes full of wonder, to watch the two dragons screaming and swooping above. It was this that made Jaime feel a stab of panic. The look in the man’s eyes as he watched the dragons was downright soulful. Apparently, he was not just some unrelenting, dumb brute. He was an unrelenting brute with poetry in his eyes.

Brienne had returned that evening and sat down to eat with the men she had been working with. Jaime had watched as the ginger brute stared across the hall at her, half-hungrily, half-reverently. Jaime could not tell whether he viewed her a goddess or meat. He had wished then to have his hand back. To be unstoppable again instead of crippled.

Remembering this now, Jaime feels a twinge of jealous arousal. At least, it starts off as a twinge. Within seconds, it is a full-on ache that settles in his groin. He is pretty sure that in situations like this, the need for intimacy should come second to the need for warmth, shelter, food and water, but somehow getting Brienne to take off her clothes for him seems more essential than any of the other things. He wonders doubtfully if he can convince her of that.

He forces himself to get up and leave the tent. The lion engraved on his armour suddenly feels unbearably pompous when compared with the wildlings’ rudimentary layers of fur. Almost as embarrassing as the golden hand. His name, his wealth, his wit: none of it is worth a shiny shit up here. Only survival matters, and Brienne is with him because she can find the way and fight, and he can do neither.

He remembers Myrcella dying in his arms and imagines Cersei’s faceless corpse, and he feels a sheer horror at the realisation that if anything were to happen now, he quite probably could do nothing to protect Brienne. That ginger brute would be able to look after her, but he, Jaime, cannot.

Brienne is shaking snow from the horses’ blankets and feeding them oats, their nostrils steaming as they take turns munching from her hands, their lips pulling back to show huge teeth. The blizzard has thankfully stopped, and Jaime approaches and hands her more bread and cheese.

“Sit and eat,” he commands, before taking over responsibility for dismantling the camp. He removes snow from the horses’ hooves, folds blankets and rolls up the canvas. Brienne accepts this gallantry, and perches on a rock to eat as he works, but when they are ready to depart and he attempts to help her onto her horse, she looks at him as though he has grown another head.

“What are you doing? I’m not so feeble that I can’t mount a horse.”

Jaime is too frustrated even to reply. He mounts his own horse and they set off again, Brienne leading the way along frozen brooks and through white gullies and meadows, occasionally stopping to check on the position of the sun -when it is not swaddled in cloud.

As the light begins to seep away, Jaime eyes the sky. “There’s more snow coming and I’ll be damned if we’re getting a moon tonight. We can’t risk riding the horses in the dark and the snow. If one of them breaks a leg…”

But Brienne is pointing and Jaime follows the direction of her finger to a point two or three miles away where a few dark shapes stand out against the snow. “It’s a hamlet. We can take shelter in one of the cottages.”

Jaime nods impassively, and urges his horse on faster.


	10. Chapter 10

The gain entry to a tiny, two-bedroomed cottage with a thatched roof and a stable that doubles as a log store just as darkness falls. Within moments, Brienne has demonstrated that, while she might be big and an intimidating fighter, she is made of much softer stuff than Bronn, who Jaime last travelled with. The first thing she does is spend several moments deliberating over whether to bring the horses into the cottage so they can warm up in front of the fire she plans to light.

“That’s a good idea,” says Jaime. “And then when they’re warm enough, you can put them to bed on the straw mattress and tuck them in under the furs. And I’ll tell them a bedtime story while you heat some milk for them.”

Brienne’s mouth twitches, but her tone remains serious. “I don’t want them to die during the night.”

“Nor do I,” says Jaime. “I also don’t want them to forget that they are horses during the night, and by morning be demanding that you suckle them from your breasts, and that I carry them across the northern landscape so they don’t get cold hooves.”

“Gosh, what it must be to have such an active imagination.”  

“I have to make up for your lack of it,” says Jaime. “That’s what marriage is –a parasitic arrangement whereby one benefits from qualities that one lacks by obtaining a spouse who possesses those qualities. You, for example, are drearily good, which makes up for my badness. I, in turn, have to be exceptionally vivacious to make up for your dourness.”

“Well, as we aren’t married, perhaps you could tone down both the imagination and the vivacity for the moment.”

“But I’m practising,” says Jaime. “I intend to spend several decades compensating for your grimness and that will require no small effort. I need to train.”

“Hmm,” says Brienne, looking doubtfully at the stable.

“Brienne, they’ll be far more comfortable in this stable with a few blankets and all this straw. This is what they had at Winterfell; they were fine there.”

Brienne gazes on the horses like a mother gazing on a son prior to sending him off to squire for a particularly bad-tempered knight. She does however allow Jaime to shut the stable door and guide her back to the cottage. And there comes the second thing that betrays the soft stuff she is made of. She had removed her gloves to unsaddle, cover and feed the horses.

“Gods, Brienne. Your hands are like blocks of ice.” Given he had just been boasting of his imagination, this simile falls far short of creative. The truth is, after twelve odd hours of seeing nothing but snow and ice, he has frozen water on the mind. “ _I’ll_ make the fire,” he says. “You get your armour off and get a blanket or six wrapped around you.” He had forgotten how cold women get. How, on the rare occasions that he and Cersei could lie together _afterwards_ , she would warm her cold feet on his legs and her hands on his chest. He has a sneaking suspicion that he had believed he could eventually thaw her heart in the same way, by keeping his warm one near hers.

His sister is dead. How strange, and yet how utterly predictable.

“You have to get warm too,” Brienne is insisting as they enter the cottage. “I’ll make-”

“I’m not being gallant,” says Jaime, irritated that she always has to argue with him. “We have three hands between the two of us. Let’s not lose anymore to frostbite. You’re no good to anyone without them.”

Brienne mutinously sits before the grate and unfastens her armour. Jaime thinks she is the strangest woman he has ever met. Try to take care of her out of love, and she will throw it right back in your face. Tell her you want her safe so she can continue to be useful to others, and she grudgingly accepts.

Despite the momentary relief of being out of the wind and snow, the cottage soon reveals itself to be about as warm and cheerful as Tywin Lannister’s eyes on the day he found Jaime had joined the Kingsguard. No hot water is piped through its walls, and the last time embers glowed in the grate must have been over a fortnight ago, when the inhabitants either fled south or accepted Jon Snow’s call to Winterfell. A bowl of fetid water on the table has a covering of ice.

Jaime makes several trips back to the stable, lugging back as much wood as he can carry. He throws the furs around Brienne and builds up a roaring fire, before collecting snow in a pot and heating it over the flames. When the water is moderately warm, he removes it from the fire and makes Brienne sit with her hands in it, while he removes his armour. After twenty minutes or so, when her hands have turned pink, Brienne rises and begins to search the room.

“Are you hungry?” he asks, assuming she is hunting for food.

Brienne ignores him. She has given up looking through cupboards and behind curtains in favour of examining the wooden floor and her eyes suddenly fix on a point. In a second, she is pulling up the floorboard, and, in the gap beneath, Jaime sees a small heap of coins and a sack.

“How did you-?” he begins.

Brienne pulls several lumps of coal from the sack. “Black dust in the grate,” she says. “They wouldn’t want to haul it with them, but they wouldn’t want it taken by looters if they’re lucky enough to return. This should heat the place up.”

She is _so much_ smarter than him. So much more fucking capable. Jaime regards her with a feeling of growing desperation as she kneels to add the coal to the fire, her mind apparently occupied only by practicalities. He studies the outline of her thighs, muscular but graceful. When she leans back, her tunic rises slightly and he can just see the beginning of the tight laces that keep her breeches around her hips. The swelling of her breasts beneath her tunic is subtle but unmistakeable. Too subtle, Jaime decides, for most men to appreciate because most men are dumb and want everything to be brash and obvious.

 “You were saying you were hungry?” Brienne is looking at his rather strangled expression and misinterprets him. As usual.

“No. I asked you if you were hungry.” He dislikes how she can sit there so calmly while he feels anything but calm.

Brienne reaches for Jaime’s bag and pulls out hardboiled eggs, salted pork, more bread and some kind of pie. She gives him a quizzical look.

“I think there’s enough for a few days,” he says. “Wouldn’t hurt to kill a rabbit or two though.”

“I think the rabbits would disagree,” says Brienne distractedly. “Where did you get all this? Wasn’t the kitchen locked?”

 “Before I woke you, I woke one of the kitchen girls and told her that a friend and I wanted a midnight feast. Then I woke another and told her the same.”

Brienne purses her lips and gets up to find some plates and cutlery. When she returns, she does not resume her place beside him at the hearth but sits on a chair.

 _All the better for looking down on me_ , thinks Jaime.

“Shame,” he says. “I think the extra heat we had from burning the coal is being cancelled out by your chilly disapproval.”

“I just hope you didn’t get them in trouble. A man going into their chambers at night-”

“Don’t fret. If anyone saw, they’ll forget soon enough when a hundred thousand murderous corpses descend on them. It’s hardly necessary to have such delicate sensibilities right now.”

“Easy for a man to say.”

“Easy for a woman to say too,” says Jaime. “You were the one who said things would change after this war. You said women wouldn’t let things go back to how they were. Don’t you want a world where a woman’s virtue lies in her heart rather than her hymen?”

Brienne manages a shrug and Jaime wishes she would flare up a little instead of looking so carefully impassive. _I’m a commander. I should know how to lay siege._ But Brienne is a strange type of castle, walls tumbling then restoring themselves in seconds.

“Don’t you?” he persists.

“Of all the privileges that men have, flitting from bed to bed without being seen as damaged goods is not the one I envy.”

“Then what do you envy us?”

She shakes her head slightly before saying, “What do _you_ envy women? Nothing, I suppose.”

Jaime grins. “I do actually. But if I told you, you’d blush so hotly we wouldn’t need that fire anymore.”

Brienne becomes very interested in her plate, attending to her meat with a meticulousness that would be more fitted to fine needlework.

Jaime finishes his own food before going to examine the cottage. In the other smaller room is a straw mattress, and another fireplace. There are no blankets; the previous tenants must have taken those. Jaime fetches wood and coal and lights a fire in that grate too. The room badly needs warming. Back in the first room, behind a small door, he finds what he had really been looking for all along. A small keg of ale. He takes two cups from a cupboard and fills them.

“Shouldn’t we be on our guard?” Brienne asks, as he presses one into her hand.

“No,” says Jaime. “We’re safe. Relax now and our wits will be sharper on the morrow.”

Brienne accepts the cup.

Two and a half cups later, and she has abandoned the moral high ground of the chair and is sprawled on the furs with Jaime in front of the fire.

“It’s good to feel warm again,” she says. “Isn’t it?”

“Mm.” Jaime is watching those long legs, imagining them without the breeches. Wrapping around him as he thrusts into her. The ale has loosened Brienne’s limbs and her tongue, and -he can only hope- her scruples too. They have spent the last hour comparing childhoods: fathers, siblings, the gaps left by mothers, the different sounds of the sea, swimming, diving, favourite meals and stories, their fathers’ expectations.

“Were you ever betrothed?” asks Jaime now.

Brienne shifts slightly, but her voice is steady when she replies. “You know I was.”

“Who to?”

“The younger son of Lord Caron. I don’t even remember his name I was so young. He died.”

“Anyone else?”

“Ser Humfrey Wagstaff.”

“What a lovely name,” says Jaime, chuckling. “Brienne Wagstaff… though I suppose he’d have taken your name. Did he die too?”

“He came rather near,” she says. “I was sixteen and he was five and sixty. He said I would have to conduct myself as a lady and do as he told me, after the wedding. I challenged him to a fight, and broke his collarbone and two ribs.”

Jaime laughs until his eyes well up. “Anyone else?” he asks at last, watching her carefully.

“What about you?” she asks. “Were you ever betrothed?”

“Almost. To Lysa Tully. I passed up one mad woman for another mad woman. Brienne?”

“Yes.”

“I should have stuck with you. After we got back to Kings Landing, I mean. Joffrey released Barristan Selmy; he’d have released me -with my one hand- quicker than you could say ‘disembowelled cat’. I should have been with you. We could have had a few years together, and you might actually like me by now.”

“I _do_ like you.”

“Do you?” Jaime smiles. “I think you used to. Then I made the mistake of getting sentimental with you, and now you’re wary as hell.”

“Wary? I came out here with you on pure trust.”

“That’s because you love me. You wish you didn’t though, and you don’t trust my intentions regarding you.”

Brienne’s expression has become defiant, hot. Her eyes move to his lips and she starts to shift forward, but then thinks better of it, retreats. She takes another gulp of ale.

Jaime exhales wearily. “You never knew Ned Stark but you’d have liked each other. I once heard him tell his son the only time a man can be brave is when he is afraid. I imagine the same is true of a woman. What are you going to do, Brienne? Because you’re no coward.”

Slowly, very tentatively, she leans in. Her lips hover inches from his and her eyes are huge and so bewitchingly beautiful that Jaime feels a little crazy as he looks into them. When her mouth finally grazes his, he expects to feel sated. Relieved. Instead he just wants more. The kisses he returns to her are rough and hungry. For a second, he forgets about his missing hand and tries to cup her face. His stump rests limply on her cheek, before he flings it down again, hooking his arm around her waist instead, and pushing gently, gently, until she is on her back in the blankets.

His fingers stroke the white scars across her collarbone -the bear’s claws- and he has a brief image of her at sixteen, refusing to submit to Humfrey Wagstaff unless the old man could beat her in a fight. Of course the decrepit fool hadn’t stood a chance. Then Jaime imagines himself in the place of the old knight. Unchained, strong as the sea, and with his right hand. She’d have given him a good fight, true enough. She’d have parried and blocked and danced out of reach time and time again, but he would have brought her down eventually. And wouldn’t he have loved to see the look in those blue eyes as it dawned on her that none of her defences were going to be enough. That she was going to be his. And when he’d brought her down, he would have taken her hand, helped her up, and led her to the sept. He’d have wed her there and then, in their sparring clothes, still red-faced and sweating. Then he’d have taken her directly to the bed chamber and brought her down in a myriad of other ways. He’d have made her forget every bad thing that had ever happened to her. Every cruel insult. He’d have made her forget where she was, what her name was, and the name of every other damn person in the world who wasn’t him. Jaime, Jaime, Jaime. That would have been the only word she would have been able to think of or cry out. Repeatedly. Frantically. And when they were done, she would never want to shut him out or hide from him again. She would love him without reserve, the way he loved her.

Gods, he is hard. Panting, he breaks the kiss and looks down at her. “Do you -do you want to go to the other room?” he manages to say. The blush that creeps across Brienne’s face and down her neck tells him she knows what he is asking her.

“We’re… we’re all right here, aren’t we?”

Jaime feels the stun of disappointment. He stares at the fire, at the floor, at the furs, anywhere but at her. He loves two people in this entire world, and of those, he trusts only one. And she does not want this. She doesn’t want him.

When her hand rests on his cheek, it is a shock. “All right,” she says.

It takes him a moment to process those two words, but when he does, he lurches to his feet, a nervous energy pooling in his stomach.

 “We should bring the furs,” he says.

“Yes,” she whispers. She begins to pick them up, very slowly, it seems to Jaime. He leans down and quickly slings the rest into the crook of his right arm.

“We should -we ought to wash the plates too,” Brienne says, standing up. “And the cups. And put the floorboard back. We should tidy-”

But Jaime isn’t in the mood to have her stalling. He takes her wrist and leads her to the room where the mattress lies and the fire he lit earlier has smouldered down to embers. He throws the furs down onto the mattress. Then, reluctantly, lest she should escape to wash plates after all, he releases her wrist in order to build the fire back up. When he turns, she is motionless and staring at the mattress, wide-eyed.

Jaime approaches her cautiously. His hand finds her face and his chest brushes against hers as he kisses her gently. He can taste the ale on her tongue, can feel the warmth it has put in her cheeks. Her lips -the lips he once thought too big- are divine.

When she breaks away, he knows it is time for the next step. His hand goes to her tunic before he considers that it would be more gallant to remove his own first. He pulls his woollen tunic over his head and drops it to the ground. Then his breeches: slowly he unlaces them, pushes them to the floor and steps out of them. Off come his socks. Then his smallclothes. Finally, he stands before her naked.

“It’s your turn…”

She nods mutely, but still makes no move to undress, so Jaime does it for her. “Don’t be nervous,” he murmurs, tugging at her breeches. “I’ve seen you before, remember?”

It is still cold and she is shivering by the time he has removed her last garment, so he pulls her to the mattress to get her warm under the furs. He desperately wants to get his tongue between her thighs and render her a helpless, moaning mess but he suspects tonight is too soon for that.

Her arms snake round his neck as he positions himself over her, between her legs, but she is staring at the ceiling and not him.

“Look at me,” he breathes. “Please look at me.”

She manages it for about a second, just long enough to give him a watery return on his smile, before shyness takes over and she shuts her eyes.

Carefully, Jaime’s fingers find their way between her thighs, and he begins to stroke. She exhales, an almost-moan. He kisses her breasts, her neck and her shoulders -she bucks against him. Then he moves back to her lips which are flushed and plump.

“These were made for kissing, you know,” he tells her.

She stiffens, eyes fluttering open. “They’re just lips. All lips are the same.”

“No,” Jaime says. “Most are made for letting people talk rubbish or eat too much or drink too much or sneer or play the pipe badly. Yours though...”

Between her thighs, he slips a finger inside her, causing her to gasp. His cock is straining to follow it into that dark, warm, wet place.

“Jaime,” she whispers between kisses. “I…”

“Hmm?” His thumb continues to caress her. He is lost in a haze of pleasure and warmth and tenderness.

“Jaime, I can’t.”

It is Jaime’s turn to stiffen now. “You can’t…?”

“This,” she whispers miserably. “I can’t do this.”

“ _Why_?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry. I thought I could.”

“But I’ll be gentle. I’ll go as slowly as you want.”

“It’s not that.”

“If you’re worried about getting with child I can-”

“No.”

“What then?” he asks. His cock throbs achingly against her. She is so wet. “What did I do wrong?”

“Nothing.” Tearfully, she kisses him on the forehead. “You did nothing wrong. It’s me. I -I’m tired. I need to sleep.”

And with that she has wriggled out from under him and turned her back. Jaime, in a frenzy of frustration and rejection, sniffs and tastes the finger that made it inside her. As soon as her breathing has become regular, he takes himself in hand, and, imagining himself licking and fucking her senseless, brings himself to a slightly teary climax. It is only as he lies there getting his breath back that he realises she is breathing in that regular but shallow way people do when they are pretending to sleep. He curls himself against her back and kisses her neck, hoping it will do for an apology. When she relaxes into him, he dares to drape his arm across her stomach. Then she falls asleep for real.

 _Trembling_ , Jaime thinks shamefacedly. _She wasn’t shivering, she was trembling._

Then he too drifts into sleep under the mountain of furs.

 

 

 

In the early morning, there is blood. Jaime stirs, feels the wetness and pushes the furs down to look, just about making it out in the half-light. Blood on the mattress. Blood on Brienne’s thighs. Blood on the tip of Jaime’s cock, which has reasserted itself and nudged between the lady’s legs, oblivious to the fact that it is not wanted there.

The cold air awakes Brienne, and she raises her head, too bleary to think of covering her breasts or mound, allowing Jaime a sight that catapults him straight back to the desires of last night.

“Oh,” she says, and the familiar blush suffuses her face as she registers the blood. “Oh no. It’s come early. I’m sorry.” 

Then she becomes aware of her own nakedness and of Jaime’s eyes on her, and her mortification is complete. She drags the furs back up to her chin.

“Don’t be sorry.” He yawns and unenthusiastically gets out of the warm bed, wrapping his cloak around him. This, he decides, is fate having a laugh at his expense: to end up with blood on his cock despite having none of the fun of deflowering her. He finds a towel hanging on the back of the door and retrieves Brienne’s smallclothes from the floor where he had so breathlessly discarded them last night.

“Got your dagger?” he asks. “Help me cut some off.”

He lies half the towel over the blood that has seeped into the mattress and Brienne, careful to keep the blankets around her breasts now, takes another strip to put inside the smallclothes she has just donned.

It is still rather dark, and after making another fire, Jaime climbs back under the furs and watches the flames.

“Are you disgusted?” Brienne asks after a while of silence.

“No. Why would I be?”

“My septa said men find it revolting. That they don’t want to know of _women’s business_.”

Jaime decides against telling her the number of times he bedded Cersei while she bled. A thought occurs to him. “What else did your rancid septa tell you? Did she ever talk to you about -about what we nearly did last night?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say about it?”

“She said it would hurt the first few times. That I would get no enjoyment, but it was the duty of a wife.”

Yes, all that, Jaime had expected.

Brienne continues, steelier now. “She said I should never allow myself to believe any compliments or declarations of love because they only did it to win my father’s favour. That it was easier for me to know the hard truth all along than have the heartbreak of discovering the lie after the wedding. And she said that while some girls might inspire reverence and tenderness in their men in the bedchamber, I never would, and the most I could do was to obey -to atone for my inadequacy by doing whatever he ordered, no matter how distasteful I might find it.”

Jaime wants to scream. Instead he says through gritted teeth, “Is that why you couldn’t, last night?”

“No,” says Brienne dully. “I was ready for pain and for you to -to take your pleasure. I was willing to accept that in order to bring you some comfort. But when it came to it-”

“Comfort?” says Jaime quietly. “When it came to it -what?”

“What do you call it?” she says. “The act?”

Jaime frowns, unwilling to use the language of ‘fucking’ or ‘taking’ right now. “Bedding,” he says. “Or coupling.”

“Implying that it happens with somebody one has agreed to share a bed with, and that there are only two people there -a couple?”

“I suppose so.” Jaime thinks of Cersei grudgingly allowing Robert into her bed. She had hardly been happy about it.

“That doesn’t describe what’s nearly been forced on me so many times,” says Brienne bitterly. “There was never a bed, just hard ground. There was never just one man -always a group of them, laughing or hurting me.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I should have-”

“You shouldn’t be sorry. You saved me from it time and again when we were captured. But many of my close encounters with men have been either violent or -or humiliating. It’s hard not to see- to see this,” she gestures vaguely between their bodies, “as something to be avoided.”

_Humiliating. Is she speaking of Ronnet Connington?_

“I knocked Red Connington into the dirt when I found out what he did to you,” Jaime blurts out. He badly wants her to know this. “He told me, and seeing him spit blood everywhere was sweeter than being knighted.”

Brienne’s eyes are wide. At last she says, “Thank you. I knocked him down too. At the melee at Bitterbridge.”

“You’d repaid the humiliation already then.” Of course she had.

“Yes. Though I wasn’t thinking of him when I mentioned humiliation.”

“Who then?” demands Jaime.

Falteringly and without looking at him once, she tells him of the wager. Of the gifts -flowers, books, drinking horns. Of the love songs played outside her pavilion. Of the way they had jostled to fetch drinks for her, to clean her armour, to sit beside her. She tells him of Owen Inchfield grabbing and kissing her. She tells him of discovering the truth, of Randyll Tarly telling her that the fault was hers, of being unable to sleep at all now if men were nearby. “Except you. I can sleep with you near.”

When she is done, Jaime could almost weep. The near-rapes she had experienced while captured with him had been brutal and frightening, and he was sure there had been other attempts by other men; Brienne had travelled alone for a long time. It was the sly efforts of her supposed comrades that had undone her though. Her vile septa had laid the foundations and those _knights_ had done the rest. How could a soul as honest and guileless as Brienne’s encounter their deceit and cruelty without being injured? Jaime is reminded of the shriek of his sweet, white horse as it went up in flames on the Goldroad. Innocence always punished by the brutes of this world. And after all that, he Jaime had thrown himself at her feet declaring love. No wonder she had refused to believe him. No wonder she had cried.

 “Why did you jump in front of that bear?” she asks. “You must have known you could die.”

Jaime considers. His normal propensity for flippancy has gone; offering her honesty suddenly seems very important. “I just loved you, I think,” he says. “I hadn’t admitted it to myself but- that was the only reason I did it really.”

By the time dawn has pushed its way through the cloud and darkness, Jaime is no longer convinced that fucking is the only way of making one body out of two. His limbs are so entangled with Brienne’s, he no longer knows or cares what belongs to who. Her womb is aching and the circular motions that he last night made between her thighs with his fingertips he now echoes on her abdomen with his whole hand, trying to bring her some relief.

“Couldn’t we just stay here like this?” He thinks he hears her say this as he removes his lips from her ear and begins the process of becoming just one person again.

“We could. But I’d have thought you’d want to check on the horses.”

“Oh, the horses!” She is out of his arms and out of their bed in a moment, and within the half hour they are dressed, have saddled the horses and are once more on their way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has commented and left kudos so far. You don't know how much I appreciate knowing that people have actually enjoyed reading it.


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